Everybody on the Internet claims to be an empath, but I know that can't be true because if it were heads would be catching on fire left and right.

The Internet takes you from holocaust to gunshot wound to sneering satirical news story to cat meme to sentimentality porn to actual porn in a matter of seconds.  My brain can't deal with it.  My adrenals are shot and I feel the confusion in my body too as restlessness, fear, low-level chronic pain.  I have to find a place to put it where it doesn't hurt me as much.  Recipes and emails, only.  Maybe some crochet patterns.  It's easier by far to trust the televised news than to wade through the layers of propaganda, opportunism, advertisement, and plain hack, hollow journalism on here.  Who can you trust?  NPR? Reuters? My suspicion never stops, my "follow the money" never stops and the gnawing distrust, the refusal to be a sucker--it never allows me to relax and yet...I end up believing everything anyway.  Or more specifically, I still bear the psychic burden of being perpetually in a defensive mode, not quite believing anything I read, the burden of perpetual uncertainty, AS WELL AS, all the fear, guilt, shame, empathy, joy, envy, etc. of just believing and accepting everything I see/read at face value.  

I'm not trying to sound special here, honestly I think I relate to the Internet this way because of my age.  I grew up attuned to network television, books, radio.  When we got cable, especially MTV, I thought the wide world of options and the rapid cuts from shot to shot might eventually drive me crazy.  Well, I guess ultimately they did.   

I don't know how anybody stands it, but younger people, they've always had to process at this pace, they don't know any other way.   I don't know whether to pity or envy them, I wish I could see side-by-side brain scans of my brain and a 20 year-old's brain. How does a brain withstand an entire lifetime on the Internet?  Will it end up stronger, smarter, more resilient?  Will it burn out faster?  Last longer?  Lack vital survival skills: an attention span, for example?

I watched three videos on YouTube yesterday of people who had claimed to have gone to hell and returned, then I watched the governor's update on coronavirus numbers, then later some old Saturday night live clips, and then a short doc about a family-owned restaurant in Brooklyn.  I watched another YouTube video months ago of Sadhguru explaining the reason so many people have thyroid malfunctions nowadays.  He said the role of the thyroid, in part, was to sort of contextualize all the stimuli that a person encounters over the course of time, stitch it together in an understandable narrative and sort of metabolically, hormonally, prepare the body to accept that stimuli as being normal/natural.  The thyroid's job, he said, was to protect the person from being jerked around (I'm paraphrasing) by all the disparate information within his surroundings, to regulate the body's response and keep it functioning evenly, predictably.

Well, think of the demands the Internet--on top of the regular-occurring stimuli of daily life--makes of the little thyroid captain.  Here's a terrifying story about how we're all going to die, and now here's Gwenyth Paltrow reading her mom's texts, and now here's statistics on racial violence in America, here's an article about how you are complicit in said racial violence, here's a discussion thread with posts by women who've experienced late miscarriage and now the phone is ringing and somebody in the family is sick and now there's a flash flood alert and a siren is blaring outside and ask not for whom the siren blares!! 

Moral of the story: cancer in my thyroid.