Bridget Phetasy

I’ve been thinking a lot about the lyrics so indelibly burned into my brain from ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, the song that made Kurt Cobain famous and Nirvana a global phenomenon. Even the Nevermind album’s cover image, the naked baby chasing the dollar on a string underwater, was prescient. If any-one predicted our reality-show president, our escalating stupidity and our race to rock bottom, and had the understanding that we could amuse ourselves to death, it was Kurt.

Recently I had one of those dreams. I woke up wanting to forget it immediately, like most dreams. But it reached out from the depths of my subconscious with a message that rippled and reverberated through my waking day. You know those dreams? They’re sticky. In my dream, I’m sitting at the bedside of an older woman. She looks familiar. I can’t place how I know her — she isn’t my mother or an aunt — but I can’t shake the feeling that we are related. The woman holds my hand. She is dying. ‘Bridget,’ she asks, ‘how do you feel about the time you spend on Twitter?’ What a weird question for a woman on her deathbed to be asking, I think. Nonetheless, her question makes me defensive.

Nearly three months into lockdown, 40 million Americans were unemployed. Kids lost out on three months of schooling. Businesses shuttered, many never to open again. Mental health suffered. People lost their homes. Tens of thousands died alone in hospitals, family members were prevented from holding the hands of their loved ones in their final days, and in many cases they weren’t allowed to bury them or hold a funeral. Parents struggled to balance distance learning and work. Teachers worried that their most vulnerable students weren’t logging in to class. People couldn’t receive medical treatment or attend birthdays and graduations. But humans are creative, resilient creatures, and it didn’t take long before we adjusted to living online.

When Tarana Burke started the original Me Too movement in 2006, it was about the victims. It was about power in numbers and emboldening survivors of sexual assault to come out of the shadows. When the allegations about Harvey Weinstein broke in 2017 and #MeToo really started gaining traction, I was happy to see the purging of predators across all industries and political parties. #MeToo was a bipartisan movement that was long overdue. After a few questionable high-profile accusations, such as the hit piece against the comedian Aziz Ansari on the now-defunct website babe.net, lots of voices started to ask if #MeToo had gone too far.

It’s 1 am. I finally finish preparing my sourdough to go in the fridge. Time for some Netflix. What? No connection. Hulu doesn’t connect either. Dear God, no. Amazon Prime? Nope. It’s worse than I thought. Please just be my router, please just be my router. I unplug the router and wait 30 seconds. Plug it back in. Nope. Where did I put that damn manual? Now I need to find something small enough to stick in the reset hole button. I get a toothpick. I say a prayer. It’s not the router. The internet is down. God has abandoned us. I feel a great disturbance in the force. As if millions of gamers suddenly cried out in terror — and were suddenly silenced. I feel something terrible has happened.

It’s Lent and the good Catholic schoolgirl in me loves this season of fasting and rending the heart and not my garments and all that jazz, so I dug deep and asked myself the hard question: what would be the most challenging thing in my life to give up? Since I’ve already given up heroin, cocaine, alcohol, weed, cigarettes and toxic men, two primary substance addictions remain: coffee and Twitter. If I’m honest with myself, Twitter is the most hardcore addiction I have and it’s also the one that robs me of the most productivity. So. Into the media desert I go...I rip the Band-Aid off around 5 p.m. PST on Tuesday, logging out from my account and removing the app from my phone. Goodbye, my love. Day 1: Holy Moly. I have a problem. 6 a.m. PST: Ash Wednesday.

Last week my cousin started a group text with three other cousins, two childhood friends and myself, as a virtual support group during social distancing and a way to stay connected. At first it was basically for memes and relevant articles we found interesting or informative — but it wasn’t long before the group devolved into sharing screenshots and anecdotes of the frustrating conversations they were having with their boomer/silent generation parents and relatives. I’d been having similar, exasperating conversations with stubborn loved ones for weeks. I understand that facing your mortality is terrifying and often we react with one of the most powerful mechanisms the human psyche has in the face of fear and death — denial.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Political tribalism is high school all over again. I moved every year and a half growing up, and one of the many side effects was that I became deeply distrustful of groups. I went to 10 schools in 12 years — three of them in eighth grade. It was hell. I was always the outsider. If I was acknowledged at all, it was as ‘new girl’ and, once they got to know me a bit better, ‘Bitchit’ or, my personal favorite, ‘Birdshit’. I went to schools in rich suburbs where I was ‘poor’ and schools in inner cities where I was the minority.

There's no room for weakness when you're fighting for your life. And that's exactly what I remember when I wake up at 10am, unable to soothe my grogginess with a Venti Mocha Latte. How could I participate or contribute to a company that hates black people and loves police brutality? The same is true for all of us in the #Resistance. That latte would be nice, but not as nice as ending white supremacy. I try to remind myself that no sacrifice is too great when fighting against a man who is literally Hitler. Yet it turns out I have to sacrifice even more than Starbucks. More than Uber, Kanye's Sunday Service and Coachella which I've also had to painfully let go of in the struggle against the forces of evil. The week began with me losing my Bible, The New York Times.

My first thought as news broke of the catastrophic fires raging in Notre-Dame Cathedral yesterday was, ‘I need to find the pictures of my trip to France.’ As the 856-year-old church creaked and crumbled, and smoke billowed over the French capital where Parisians had gathered to sing hymns, watching their beloved landmark burn in horror, my attention turned to the true victim of this tragedy: me, an American woman with an Instagram account. People don’t understand how much pressure there is as an American to hijack global heartbreak and personalize it. As a social media user, it’s imperative that in such dark times for humanity, you let everyone know you have a connection to this particular disaster, no matter how obscure or far removed in the past.