Too Much Reality?

I decided to detach myself from social media while I prepared for my Class 10 board exams. I’ll admit that initially not checking social media made me feel somewhat like a fish without a pond. I’d jolt out of bed every morning with the bitter realisation that I had not scrolled through Instagram in 27 days! My thumbs seemed somewhat lost, yearning to double-tap a post by Kendall Jenner, Mari Andrew or Conde Nast. I mourned my Snapchat streaks, long dead, buried deep underground in the vast, inescapable Internet cemetery. Facebook? Don’t even ask. Oh, how I missed the Donald Trump memes, the decadent snapshots of Avocado Toast, John Oliver’s weekly roasts… 

A month and half into this detachment, something happened. Sitting at the dining table one dreary Tuesday morning, I zoned out staring at a picture of a maiden clasping a basket full of persimmons in my, Germany: A Study in Depth, textbook. Momentarily, my vision tessellated, transitioning from the lazy Susan before me brimming with cubed mangoes, day-old Upma and a pitcher of filter coffee. I was transported… far far away, to a place where I no longer had to dread my mammoth board exams just around the corner.

Me. Four-feet tall. Seven years old. Sixteen milk teeth remaining. Scrambling up the ladder of my bunk bed, wearing a billowing floral dress and a feathered victorian hat. I’ve always been a kid thoroughly obsessed with the past. I remember rushing home from school, ready to paint my face like a jungle spirit and dance to Gypsy music, or slip on a shimmering gown and plan the infrastructural advancements of a kingdom in the Pacific Ocean. I even went as far as to dump quilts across five dining-hall chairs and languish on the “throne” like Cleopatra, bribing my two little sisters into feeding me grapes one by one! Escaping into a labyrinthine world of make-believe every single day for nearly a decade, I’d say I’d pretty much mastered the art of imaginary invention. 

Flash forward a few good years. I’ve been caught up in the high school rut of achieving A’s, zipping from tuition to piano class to athletics to sleep-less sleepovers to rather pointless parties. Definitely no time for seamlessly traversing the line between reality and imaginary! These vibrant childhood adventures were long forgotten, only to be wistfully remembered amidst papers littered with the cosine rule formula, diagrams of the placenta, and complex mind-maps explaining the ascent of the Nazis. Through this seemingly monotonous realm of detachment, I had rediscovered a more profound attachment.  

I took a step back from a virtual world that has dug its fangs deep into our existence - a place where emotions predominantly run high and shallow, where the earth rotates a hundred times a minute, where the complex human spirit is captured within trends, hashtags, comments and puppy-dog filters. How magnificent and heartbreaking is it, that the remotest, most intriguing depths of the world can be encapsulated in a 5x3 inch screen? I realised how thoroughly connected and disconnected I had simultaneously been living my life. Online on WhatsApp, but emotionally offline. My human connections were vast and continental, yet fragile enough to be severed by snail-paced band-width. 

Living in the digitized, sensationalised 21st century, finding a balance is like being precariously perched on a fence, teetering, desperate to find a personal definition of human connection before toppling over one side or the other. For now, I think the best way to seek my definition is to transition from being precariously perched, to precariously balanced.