My vision clears. August 2020. A year has passed. I ended up having to move in with seven roommates to afford reliable wi-fi. I didn’t realize my TA contract was renewed until I checked my email five days earlier. I’d been planning my next hike and drafting my resume in a notebook.
I scratch my beard with one hand as I jerkily open my laptop with the other. A required meeting before the first week of classes. I’m still not comfortable with Zoom, but at least I can turn on my video. The webcam smooths out my face and makes pale hair blend into sunburned chin. I turn off self-view because I can see myself squinting. I’m itching to get out of this chair. I can feel the energy draining from me. I’m snappy. The connections are bad. Who are these people? I better not become a misanthrope on top of everything. I take swigs from the pint of orange juice at my feet.
After the call, I lurch getting out of the chair, the weight of the Fall already showing on my shoulders, exacerbated by catching sight of myself in the dark edges of the laptop’s screen.(A way of seeing my face I’m done being too familiar with.) I pad out of my new den, so similar to my aunt and uncle’s a decade ago, and through the common areas to the porch. I jostle the loose handle too much opening the door, not realizing as I step into the cozying beams of the royal yellow sun that I’ve lock myself out.
This world is how I will hold onto myself this semester, listening to music from the speaker of my phone while I handwrite video scripts, or watching the pretty city around me while I type, or lazily following the flight pattern of flies and bees in our garden with the camera app open,not taking a single picture.
I am living this hybrid life already between online and offline, real and unreal it feels. My impulse is to quit this semester, take the year off, but if the updates from friends about bankrupting businesses all across my hometown are to be believed, I need to stick with this. The internet will have to sustain us. It will take a new kind of work and recognition from me.
I need to imagine that my hand isn’t being forced to take part in a world expecting the same performance out of me that burned me to a crisp. I need to see that it’s possible to co-exist in a world with cameras, computers, and internet without becoming a tool of screening myself. I need to stop logging in to tune out how I feel physically, mentally, emotionally and instead take action to change what’s going on around me. I need to stop locking myself in. And out.
This change hurts but it is natural to the world we live in now. And it is happening everywhere—every country, suburb, city. It looks gross and it feels gross, and it is harming us, especially in the ways our growing dependence on connective technologies is being used to exploit us in these times. This awkward growth period is being awkwardly dragged into the past, how we used to do things. It is far from perfect. But like a new werewolf, us warewolves can hope that we emerge more powerful, connected with our places, sensitive to people, and responsive to our needs than we were before.