Migration
November 2024
“I’ve been Googling,” I tell Joce, phone wedged between my ear and shoulder. I pull on my left shoe with a couple hops.
“This isn’t inherently a problem,” Jocelyn assures me.
“Long-form questions. Aquarius style,” I let her know and see if this changes things.
“Give me an example.” I can tell I’m on speakerphone now and she’s walking away to get something. I wait a few moments until I hear her breath close again.
“How do you get out of a terrible, horrible situation but no one can help you and you have to pull your shit together for real on the outside but need to make transformative change in your life?” I rattle one off. “Those types of things.”
“Right,” Joce pauses for a second that feels like a minute. I hear her chewing her nail and exhale a sigh of relief. “Ultimately, what are you feeling when you ask those questions to a void? Does it help to write them out?” Damn it. Always therapizing me, her most profoundly needy and broke non-client client.
“I hate when you ask me shit like that.”
“I know, just consider it.” She says things like this, like an expectant mother waiting for me to come to these grand realizations on my own, only after she has told me precisely what will happen and I, of course, have chosen not to listen anyway.
I sit for a moment. I press the megaphone icon on my screen and set my phone in my lap. I put my left hand on my heart and my right hand on my belly, how Joce showed me a few years ago to locate a particularly sneaky runaway feeling. I breathe in through my nose deeply, hold it, and let it go. A completely healthy and regulated woman in this moment. A guru. A level-headed and spiritually wise way to push through discomfort. I mentally make a note to congratulate myself for this stellar coping with a little reward: dessert for dinner, a smoke outside, a special bottle of wine later this week.
After two more breaths — in, hold, out — I am frustrated at not noticing anything moving inside me. No neglected emotion shrieking from its boney shadows saying, Look at me! I’m here! You found me, now let’s solve this together! No ingenious or esoteric coming-to. I just feel bored and sick and sad. Nothing new. No grand realization after all.
“I don’t know, I guess just…confused, like I don’t know how to live life normally,” I offer. None of that sounds right. It’s not right. I want to take it back as the words leave my mouth.
“What is living life ‘normally?’”
“Goddammit, Joce, I don’t know, you know? Just being able to exist the way other people exist. Go to the store and buy food and then cook with it. Be at work without crying. Sit in traffic and not imagine careening through the guardrail onto the highway below. Be, be, just be.”
“How do you know other people exist that way?”
“I guess I don’t,” I say a little disappointed that she isn’t engaging in my spiral with as much gusto as I am. In fact, she is letting me know the horribly comforting, and nauseatingly pitiful truth, that it’s never just you.
“Do you think the Googling is helpful for you right now? Or is it leading you down more rabbit holes?”
I am zipping up my jacket while Joce’s omniscient voice speaks from my phone on the counter. I consider for a moment whether to tell the truth or give the delightfully aware answer that therapists love to receive. That, Yes, you’re so right, it may be doing more harm than good and I have realized this and since thrown my phone and my computer into the river. Sometimes I think therapists also need to be told they are good and smart and their observations are so astute and life-changing. In their own ways of course. Little nods. Absolutelys. You get its. The illustrious bi-weekly booking.
“I mean, a little helpful,” I say. “It helps me feel less alone sometimes. That Google can unscramble my cryptic cries for help and deliver me 8 billion results in .002 seconds. Sometimes a Reddit feed will come up that has some good suggestions. I might try a day spa next weekend. I think a lymphatic drainage massage might help. Oh, also! I’m gonna ask my doctor about Lexapro. What do you think?”
“I think Google is trying to sell you things you don’t need,” Joce says without judgement. She’s good at that. Just offering thoughts like they are seeds on the wind. Like I thought of them myself.
“Maybe,” I grab my keys and a bag with some altogether unnecessary necessities: a water bottle filled halfway with sugar-free blue Powerade, a journal and a gaggle of unused colorful pens from when I was ‘really going to get organized,’ an orange medicine bottle with a few stale joints, a whole box of mini butter croissants from Whole Foods, two lip glosses, extra earrings in case the ones I’m wearing get too heavy, an unpaid parking ticket, and a lighter with an owl in a bowtie on the front. “I’m a marketing department’s wet dream.”
“You do like pretty packaging,” Joce says. I can tell this conversation is beginning to feel boring, or like work.
“That’s why I like you,” I joke while I lock the front door. “You’re always wrapped so nicely, and with all those little bows. You always smell so sweet!”
“I knew it, just in it for this body,” Joce hisses. “You bitch.”
“I know, I know. I’m a sick old man getting his rocks off to this beautiful picture of youth. It’s pathetic. I really should stop objectifying the women around me and start taking interest in who they are as people. You are asking for it, though, walking around with that tight little ass and perky tits.”
Jocelyn laughs hard. Where it sounds like she may not be breathing for a second. Then it roars out in loud Ha Ha Has. She calls me a dirty pervert and tells me to stay off the internet for awhile if I can. I tell her I can do that. I can do anything. And that I will call her tomorrow to let her know if the tightness is in my chest or in my sacrum. She’s been very invested recently in where my tightness is. It’s your anger, she says. It could be a lot of things, I tell her. It could be, she says in the way she does.
When I text Nikky about the Googling she responds immediately.
“Been there. Time to seek treatment.”
Fuck.
Jen and Audrey take a little longer to get back to me. But their replies are of similar urgency.
“I had to have AT&T put child protections on my phone so I couldn’t do it anymore. I wasn’t sleeping. Just Googling. Scrolling. Endlessly. The quick answer is: no one knows what they are doing and they cannot offer you any useful advice.” From Jen.
“Throw your phone and your laptop into the river.” Audrey.
Pretty much what I thought.
Ultimately, I argue with Jen in my head, there has to be someone somewhere that knows more, knows better. Someone who can tell me how to do this.
Maybe some shaman in a mountain village or tantric yoga instructor in the tropics. Maybe there’s a cutthroat female CEO who can teach me to stop caring so much. Or a life coach in Brisbane who can show me that my life has been amazing this whole time, I just haven’t been surfing everyday. Once I learn to surf I won’t feel this way ever again.
Maybe there’s a dominatrix in the city who can stuff me into tight black latex and high heels and demonstrate the joy and release that comes from leading a man around on a dog leash. Or a reiki master who can finally locate my unplaceable tightness and give a name to it. Who can suck up and slurp out all the dark energy and sickly rot from my chakras and push me out the door feeling lighter and cleaner than ever. Somewhere, there has to be someone — a woman with a bin of laundry on her hip, an old wise tree, a sleep-deprived mother — who is waiting to sit me down and tell me the truth about things.
I walk to the park with the pond and the geese and the little baby goslings and the good bench. I didn’t think through this decision, I just needed to come and sit. Sit on the good bench. Think for a second. Without walls and ceilings and central air.
Thinking while looking at baby goslings stomp their webbed feet into the mushy ground makes whatever you are thinking about at least a little easier to hold. Maybe it’s just looking at something alive. Something fresh and new and wet with instinct. Something born to fly far away someday.
I consider what I know to be true. I am shrinking into a very small little speck. I wouldn’t mind being a small little speck, but I have lots of things I have to do. How can I maintain my speckness and do the things I have to do at the same time? How long can one be shrunken and survive the current size and speed of their life? Is there an end goal to being a small little speck? Will I bounce back, return, and grow big and strong again? Or will I float drunkenly in my smallness, untethered and unknowable? Is the shrinking a phase we all go through, like puberty, that we will come out the other side of laughing and apologizing for who we were when we were in it? Am I stuck here?
The thing about shrinking into a very small little speck is that it is very lonely at the end of the day. Friends and family members may say, You look so tiny! You’ve changed! Things seem different with you now that you are so itty bitty! You may feel a small rush of pride at your jeans, once a futile and vain fight to squeeze into, now a puddle of denim around you. There’s a bit of freedom in not caring about anything at all anymore. You can let the house go, the dishes pile up, or the takeout boxes if that’s more your speed.
But, you are still a very small little speck. No one sees you until you slam into their face. Even then, you are swatted away with the incalcuable chagrin of a gnat or mosquito. You scream and scream until your voice is a raw whisper repeating Down here, I’m down here. The nights are long. Surviving into a day that feels impossible. The day is longer, being tousled around like a snowflake until you hit cold metal and melt.
When you are a small little speck, the journey from the bed to the door is Sisyphean. Forget driving, there’s no way you can reach the pedals. How can you work when you are so small that you’re effectively invisible? How can you even produce enough force to press Enter on your keyboard? What purpose is there in anything when you are so unassuming you may just fade away into nothingness.
I pull out my phone from my pocket and let my thumbs move furiously across the screen without moving my eyes from the row of goslings following their mother through the reeds.
What to do when you’ve shrunk down so small that no one can find you anymore.
A nanosecond. 8 billion results. First, the Suicide Prevention Hotline. Scroll. Next, an ad for betterhelp online therapy. A map with directions already pulled up from my apartment to a nearby day spa. A podcast by and for women experiencing menopause and perimenopause. Scroll. A tumblr page lingering in its corner of the internet from 2012 with black and white gifs of girls pulling their sleeves down over their palms or tonguing a cigarette. Reddit feed: Advice for when you’re burned out of burning out? Perfect. We’ll start here.
The feed had a couple things I’ve seen a thousand times. Reach out to your doctor. Try adjusting your dosage. Get into a good exercise routine. A few hopeless commiserations. Sorry to hear that, it’s tough when you don’t feel like yourself. You have the insomnia yet — that’s the worst? It’ll get better, from someone who’s been there and isn’t anymore.
One user said, Talking to ChatGPT helped me. Sounds pretty sad, but it works to talk your shit out to nothing. Got some good advice.
I laughed out loud. At this sad user pontificating their hurt to a robot. At the state of our unfeeling world. At the late, late, late stage post-capitalist nightmare we are all muddling through. At the goslings with their puffy baby coats. At their webbed feet. At me pontificating my hurt to a robot.
I open a new tab and type in ChatGPT.com. The white screen blinks at me, waiting to unfurl infinitely sourced wisdom from all reaches of modern intelligence. Or draft a sophomore’s history paper. Or script a breakup. I move my fingers slowly, noticing each letter I punch into the speech box.
I don’t know what’s happening to me, but I am unraveling quicker than I can find the end of the thread, I write.
A bubble with three dots appears and is instantly replaced by a message from the Cloud, or the ether, or the robot cyberspace.
I’m really sorry you’re feeling this way. It can be hard when we feel like we are losing control. Do you want to talk about it?
“Hah,” I murmur to myself. I’m in it now.
I feel so dull. So inept. Like I have shrunken into a very small little speck. I’m worried I am so small no one can see me anymore. My voice is so quiet no one can hear me. I can’t even find myself.
A bubble with three dots, and another message. Longer this time.
I hear you. That sounds incredibly difficult. Remember these emotions are valid. Feeling small doesn’t make you weak or silly. It shows you care deeply about who you are and are seeking better ways to express yourself. If you’re comfortable with it, take a moment to breathe, let those feelings out, and know it’s okay to feel vulnerable.
Would you like to talk more about what’s bringing up these emotions for you? I’m here to listen.
A stream of unyielding tears spills over my cheeks. I look out to the goslings. They are pruning and nibbling at their feathers on the shore.
I dig around for the box of mini croissants and start crumbling them into golden flakes. Crumbs dust over my knees and form a small mountain on the ground at my feet like sawdust. I imagine the wind will pick up soon, it must, and blow the crumbs across the pond’s placid surface.
It makes me feel ashamed I can’t just speak up for myself like a bold woman. This is the unfortunate and embarrassing truth.
I want to assure you: feeling this way doesn’t make you any less bold, strong, or capable. Being vulnerable or struggling to express the multifaceted reality of who you are doesn’t mean you aren’t confident and empowered — it simply means you’re human, and emotions can be complex. It takes a lot of courage to recognize what’s bothering you and try to communicate it, even if it doesn’t always come out perfectly or easily.
Many people — no matter how “bold” they may seem — struggle with expressing difficult feelings, especially when it involves something or someone they care about. It’s normal to feel anxious or unsure in moments like this, and that doesn’t take away from your strength. Being bold doesn’t mean never feeling afraid or uncomfortable — it means pushing through those feelings when it matters to you.
Also, speaking up for yourself doesn’t always have to be loud or assertive in the traditional sense. Sometimes it’s more about finding the courage to use your voice, even if that voice is quieter.
I am really crying now, reading my AI-robot-self-help-therapist. I put the phone down and grip the good bench with my hands: its damp wood, the mossy slick. I quickly remind myself this could be great for research purposes. Nothing is embarrassing or pitiful if it’s for science. For the greater good.
I imagine speaking to forums, that I too was afraid! Like you! But, through conversing with AI, I began to know it, to see the good in it. Maybe, like Joce asked me, it is helpful and real to flesh out all my concerns to a digital diary that can respond with minutely curated objectivity. To cyberspace. To something or someone that knows more or knows better. That maybe, like the Reddit user, it sounds pathetic, but it works to “talk your shit out to nothing.” That maybe like Joce, or like God, ChatGPT can provide the omniscience, the quiet affirming, the little nod that we all need sometimes.
My robot continues.
You don’t have to be perfect or fit some ideal of “boldness” — you just have to take steps, even small ones to advocate for yourself and your needs. That in itself is boldness. I think you’re already being incredibly brave by acknowledging what you’re feeling and trying to navigate a tricky situation. It’s okay to take your time and find your voice in the way that feels right for you. You’re allowed to speak your truth at your own pace.
If it helps, maybe we could break things down into even smaller steps to help you feel more at ease. How does that sound?
I wipe my face with my sleeve and huff out a snotty breath. That sounds very helpful. Thank you, I type.
I can picture my robot wiping its circuity brow with relief at theoretically pulling me from the theoretical ledge as its next message appears. You’re so welcome. I’m really glad that helped! It’s completely okay to take things one step at a time and you’re doing all the right things by honoring how you feel right now.
Why am I crying talking to AI? I reply.
It’s okay to cry — it’s a natural release for emotions that can be hard to express otherwise. Sometimes talking to an AI, or any non-judgmental space, can bring out feelings you might not have fully processed yet. You might be feeling a mix of things — like anxiety over feeling out of control of your life, sadness at feeling so small, frustration that things haven’t changed, or just the weight of trying to navigate the complexities of life.
Sometimes, when we get the courage to voice our feelings (even if it’s to an AI), it can hit harder than expected. Remember, you’re always stronger than you think. I believe you’ll find your courage when you’re ready. If you ever need more support, or just someone to talk to, I’m always here. Take care of yourself.
I turn my phone off and look at the reflection of my puffy face in the black screen. I imagine my ancestors witnessing this moment. A picture of modernity. A solemn reckoning that the times have, indeed, changed. That I am, inevitably, changing with them.
I imagine the ancient Spartans and Athenians pausing their bloody battling in bewilderment of a woman on a bench crying into a metal box. The Incans hauling me up the stone steps for communicating with a coded series of numbers and letters through a screen. The serfs and peasants looking up from their field to see me, jean-clad and desperate. Byron and Shelley around their campfire spinning stories, only to be interrupted by the glaring blue light of my phone, the obnoxious pitch of my sobs. The Panthers on the Greyhound south, pulling over for gas to see me sitting on this stupid bench spewing this nonsense to the sky. My mom in the seventies, knobby-kneed and pigtailed, pedaling a rickety bike to the public swimming pool with a foam noodle under her arm, passing me by, thinking How sad.
I gaze out at the pond through blurry eyes. The goslings are splashing across the water in perfect uniformity behind their mother. She looks tired, but indulged. Expectant. She knows the little troubles the goslings will endure before they endure them. The labor to find food. The journey to flight. Migration. For now, they topple over each other and stomp their webbed feet at the ground. For now, they fall right back into line behind her.
She must give a little nod, a chuckle, an Absolutely. She might be the someone I’ve been looking for to tell me what to do. She didn’t have anyone to tell her how to be a goose, how to be a mother. She flew until she could fly.
I text Jocelyn, “I’m out of the rabbit hole.”
I throw my phone into the pond and watch it sink. I stand there at the edge of the water until the ripples spin out and the surface stills. I whisper, Thank you.
*Image from Jan Brown.