So now that I have your attention *rubbing hands in evil glee* … I bumped into this article by Paul Miller detailing the year he spent offline. He says it wasn’t what he thought it would be, and he didn’t achieve what he expected. I’ve never really understood the allure of web-detox. I mean, I get the impetus and reasoning behind it. I get that every once in a while, we feel like maybe we’re spending too much time on – for example – social media, like maybe we’re watching our lives fade away as we struggle for likes, retweets, and comments.

Maybe we realize (or – more likely – some well meaning offliner berates us) that our time would be better spent out in the fresh air, with actual real people. I’ve taken a few twitter breaks myself, but not for the usual reasons. Most people I know that went offline felt they were ‘wasting time’ on the internet, and needed to prove – to themselves and other people – that they could live without it. Twitter, specifically, has been labelled an addiction, and the quickest way to show the world you don’t have a problem is to calmly walk away.

In my case, my twitter breaks have had nothing to do with addiction and everything to do with emotional conflict between online friends, because to me, every one of my online friends is real. To some, that in itself is a sign of addiction. But I’ve never really worried about my ‘internet addiction’, even when friends, colleagues, and bosses thought otherwise. Someone once asked me if I’d been on Twitter that day, and  I said, “I passed by at 6.00 but haven’t been back.” He laughed and said, ‘You talk about it like it’s an actual place where you go hang out.” For me, the internet isn’t a distraction from life. It’s an extension of it.

Ever since I was a kid, I loved to read. I would sneak novels into parties, church services, chores, and even bodily functions. I was the kid with a backpack crossing the road unseeing because my nose was buried in a storybook. So, for me, spending my daily commute buried in a twitter app or blog is no different that spending it in the Song of Ice and Fire.

I am , by nature, a loner. I prefer my own company and keep myself occupied. I spend the bulk of my life hiding inside my head, because it’s limitless fun, and perfectly safe. For me, entertainment is just another way to spend time alone. I take quiet walks, swims, or bike rides. I watch series and analyse them. I read and write stories, drama, poetry.

I’ve always carried a little journal where I’d jot down random ideas. So for me, twitter is simply an extension of my pocket-sized notebook. Except it’s a beta version, because every once in a while, somebody comments on my random jottings, and sometimes, the commentary is useful. I’ve had pen-pals since primary school, so the friends I make via Twitter, blogs, or chat rooms are simply the next stage in my long-distance friendship evolution. I’ve even fallen in love online, and I see nothing strange about it.

There used to be a myth that people in chat rooms were weird unattractive geeks in basements. (I say that with all the love in the world, seeing as I have a well-documented geek fetish.) That’s not necessarily true anymore. We also have a lot of ‘thought leaders’ and ‘influencers’ online. We have smart people and dumb people and rich people and gorgeous people. We have people who hang out on the net for sheer pleasure, and others who would sell a nude photo kidney just to get the strangers online to notice them.

What’s common with all these people is that the internet doesn’t create them. It enables them. Twitter allows loners like me to mingle without leaving the comfort of my couch, so whether I had a Seacom Cable or not, my Friday nights would still involve rock music and my sofa. Similarly, the socialites who visit every club they can and brag about it would do so whether or not they had Foursquare mayor-ships as social proof.

The internet didn’t create cyber-bullies. It simple gave mean people an outlet to attack people without getting their noses broken. It didn’t cheapen women by making it ‘okay’ to post nude pics. It just gave closet porn stars a ready audience. It didn’t make anyone braver or louder or more reckless. It just made them less likely to worry about the consequences of actions they would have taken either way.

The internet is simply a tool, a weapon, and amplifier of the people that we already are. Saying that the internet stops children from functioning in the outdoors, or adults from resolving issues in a mature way, is like saying mobile phones make people dishonest and tardy, which incidentally, people say all the time. They reminisce about the good old days where people never bounced their dates or missed appointments, the times when you’d wait at a specific phone booth at a specific time for a call from the boy you liked.

15 years ago, nobody in Kenya had even heard of mobile phones, and now I wonder how we ever coped without them. Here’s the thing – we don’t have to. Before mobile phones, we lived, and now that we have them, we’ve evolved and built our lives around them. We can’t go back to ‘before mobile phones’ because we’re a different species now, a kind of homo-mobilis. Abandoning your cell phone to prove a point is like throwing out your fridge, shedding your clothes, and grabbing a stone to go hunting. You could do it, and you might even enjoy it, but there’s no reason why you should.

The question will always arise about spending too much time online. But like Paul Miller found out, spending time offline doesn’t necessarily equate to getting more done. When you quit drinking or smoking, you might suddenly find that you have more time and money to do other things, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll want to. It’s like giving a nerd a football helmet, or giving a jock a book. Horses, water, yadda yadda yadda. Still, if you really do want to go outside, meet people, get laid and do ‘real stuff’, the internet isn’t really stopping you.

♫ The sacrifice ♫ 12 stones ♫

On the 10th floor. I’d gone up for my daily ritual bask on the roofless 11th floor of our building’s parking structure. There’s a special corner there that has a gorgeous view of the city. I rarely look at the view though. Instead, I sit in the corner with my knees bent or my legs crossed. I close my eyes and tilt my head to the sky in worship. Then I let my mind wander to wherever it needs to be. Sometimes I half fall asleep and feel my head sway in a doze, so I wake up and make shapes out of the clouds to re-orient myself. Today I saw what I’m sure looked like a happy, laughing dragon. Those moments in the sun are the best part of my work day.

On my way back down to the office, the power went off and the lift jerked to a stop. I don’t really remember how I felt. Was I scared? Panicky? Calm and calculated? I really have no idea. I remember thinking I should breathe slowly so that I don’t run out of oxygen. And I recall trying to peep through the closed lift doors to see if I was on a solid plane or in between floors. Turns out I was in between, because I could see light filtering in through the top half of the door. That probably meant I wouldn’t suffocate.

I remember wondering how long I should wait before I started to panic, and wondering if I was strong enough to pry the doors apart if I needed to. Not that it would help, because I was on the 10th floor and couldn’t take the stairs the rest of the way. I remember peering at the roof of the lift, wondering if it had loose panels I could pry out to escape like they do in the movies. And I remember wondering what would be the ideal posture to assume in case the lift hurtled down. Should I press against the walls, squat in the corner and make myself small, try to grab the ceiling boards? And I did have a flash of that scene in Dream Team where Cass was stuck in the lift with Eugene’s wife.

I remember wondering if I should call someone to tell them I was stuck in the lift. I briefly considered tweeting it, then changed my mind. Instead, I checked if my phone had network, since my Ideot rarely did. Apparently the one advantage of my cursed Nokia Asha is it holds network in lifts. Yay!

There was a single point of light inside the lift, a little square-shaped flashy button. But I didn’t know what it was for. Then the lights came on for a few seconds and I tried to press Ground Floor but nothing happened. I looked at the flashy button and noticed it was next to the alarm button. The writing above the button said, ‘If this lift doesn’t function as expected, do not try to escape. Simply press the alarm button’. I remember wondering why I had never read that warning before, and as the lift darkened again, I wondered what the point was, because you clearly can’t read the sign in the dark.

A few minutes later – minutes in which I have no clue what I was thinking – the power came back on and I drifted safely to the ground. As I got off the lift, I saw a gorgeous woman in heels rushing in. I’m guessing she’d been waiting for 10 minutes while I was stuck, and was itching to reach her floor. I wanted to warn her that the power had just gone off, but I didn’t see what good it would do. Besides, I was distracted by all the car alarms in the parking structure suddenly blaring full-blast. I wonder what that was about.

I’ve noticed in the past that I sometimes freeze during emergencies. It’s like I step outside my body and just watch myself. I can hear my thoughts with lucid clarity, telling me the actions I should take, but for some reason, my body refuses to co-operate. The first time it happened, I was in my dorm room and the electric kettle was on fire. I watched the fire from my bed, as my mind calmly ran through scenarios.

Splash it with water? No. It’s an electrical fire, you’ll make it worse. Get some soil and throw on it? Bad idea. By the time I jump off my top bunk, unlock the bedroom door, run outside, unlock the garden door, scoop soil, and come back, the fire will be much worse. Throw my duvet on it? That might work. But the stuffing in my duvet is synthetic. It might melt.

As I continued to watch my body, I quietly called my room-mate’s name and said, ‘The room is on fire’. She shrieked, jumped out of bed, and put out the fire. She stared at the damaged desktop for a few moments, then turned and looked at me. “You froze. I can’t believe you froze!” I’ve never heard her sound like that, and the screech in her voice was painfully accusing, but I simply turned over and went back to sleep.

The next time I froze, I was sitting by a pool watching my daughter, nieces, and nephews swim. I noticed a kid drowning in the larger pool a few feet away. And once again, the space around me got very quiet, and I seemed to drift and watch things from a distance as my mind spoke.

Is my princess safe? Yes, she’s far away from the drowning kid. Are my nieces okay? They’re fine, they don’t even know what’s going on. Where’s the lifeguard? He’s over there, talking to the pretty girl in the blue bikini. What about the kid’s parents? They’re eating. They can’t see. I could jump into the water and save him. I’m a pretty good swimmer. But I have jeans on, I could get us both killed. Besides, my clothes will get wet and I don’t have any spares. Surely all these people will do something. Someone will look up and see that the kid is dying.

My body turned, tapped the kid’s dad – who was seated next to me – and said, ‘Your kid is drowning.’ He jumped, wailed, and suddenly five adults were splashing into the water getting the kid to safety. The rest of the people at the pool were spooked enough that nobody swam for the rest of the day, and I was quietly worried about what would happen if my own kid was ever in danger.

I did get tested on that a few months later. This time the princess and I were in the pool, and I was giving her lessons. She had an inflatable floater around her waist, but she had decided to take it off and use a kick-board instead. I was right next to her, and my feet could touch the bottom of the pool, so I wasn’t really worried. The trouble started when we edged toward the deep end, and everything was fine until we strayed beyond the reach of my feet.

I noticed that I was treading water, and it must have shown on my face, because the princess suddenly panicked, let go of the kick-board, and grabbed onto me. The weight of her body and the strain of treading water pulled us both beneath the surface, and I could see her terrified face as she tried to scream but only took in water. I tried to hold onto her, terrified to let her go, while I flailed my arms and legs towards the shallower end of the pool so I could step down.

I’m sure we didn’t struggle for more than two seconds, but it felt a whole lot longer. I managed to get a foothold and took a few deep breaths while holding my baby, whose limbs were coiled around me so tight I could barely breathe. I looked into her eyes and said quietly, ‘Don’t. ever. do that. again.’ She nodded, then collapsed into sputtering sobs and I held her until she calmed down before we got out of the pool and went home. Nobody else seems to have noticed what happened, which is just as well, because we’d have been banned from the pool. Probably.

I had always worried about my tendency to freeze. I thought it might one day cost me my baby’s life. So that incident at the pool vindicated me, and I will always be grateful for that. I’m still a little puzzled about just what it is that happens when I go ice like that though. My mind is always so startlingly clear, and in my head, my voice is calm and quiet in a way it never is in the real world.

I wonder if it’s a mild form of astral projection, or if my emotions just shut down to let me do what I need to. That doesn’t help though, because while my mind suggests options, my body seems incapable of following. I’m never paralysed, or even petrified. My body parts seem supple, relaxed, and perfectly capable of movement. It’s almost as if they simply choose not to. I guess one day I’ll figure it out. For today, I’m just glad I got out of the lift in one piece.

♫ Get out alive ♫ Skillet ♫

Oh these little rejections how they add up quickly
One small sideways look and I feel so ungood
Somewhere along the way I think I gave you the power to make
Me feel the way I thought only my father could

There’s a man in my life who moves me like no other. He’s tall and dark with a quick mind and a beautiful body. He’s broody and intense in a way that is unsettling. He can move me with his eyes, his words, and his soul. He has a hold on me I can’t explain or understand. I’ve been in love with him as long as I’ve known him, and at certain times, I was convinced he loved me too. But we never really got together. Something was always in the way. When I was single, he wasn’t, and vice versa. When we were both available, we weren’t talking. When we were talking, we weren’t available. He told me that he knew I didn’t love myself, but that he loved me anyway. And of course, I didn’t believe him.

Oh these little rejections how they seem so real to me
One forgotten birthday I’m all but cooked
How these little abandonments seem to sting so easily
I’m 13 again am I 13 for good?

For years, I told myself a man like him could never want a girl like me. And when I said it loud enough, I’d turn around and leave. I walked away lots of times, my heart broken from wanting someone I could never have. But somehow, I’d always come back to him. My darkest fear was that one day I’d leave and he wouldn’t be there to take me back. And I made a chilling discovery today. All this time, he hasn’t been rejecting me. I’ve been rejecting myself, projecting my views of myself onto him, assuming that’s how he saw me, and running away.

I can feel so unsexy for someone so beautiful
So unloved for someone so fine
I can feel so boring for someone so interesting
So ignorant for someone of sound mind

Each time I walked away from him, it was because I’d had enough. His little rejections and moments of silence convinced me that he just didn’t care. He didn’t answer phone calls, wouldn’t respond to emails, and sometimes went AWOL for months at a time. I’d reach a point I just couldn’t take it, so I’d throw a massive tantrum and leave. Not that it mattered, because I knew I’d always come back. He was my refuge, my comfort, my home. The one place where I could let my hair down, be completely me, and know that he loved every tiny, moody, frustrating bit.

Oh these little protections how they fail to serve me
One forgotten phone call and I’m deflated
Oh these little defenses how they fail to comfort me
Your hand pulling away and I’m devastated

Something happened to him while I wasn’t looking. He grew up. He changed. He stopped loving all the things that make me me. He wanted something else – someone else. And for all I know, he might have found her. That’s when he told me that he’d loved me all along, and that it crushed him each time I didn’t believe him. But now that I had finally accepted his unshake-able love for me, he wasn’t sure he wanted me anymore. I’d walked away one time too many, and he wasn’t sure he could face that pain again.

Oh these little projections how they keep springing from me
I jump my ship as I take it personally
Oh these little rejections how they disappear quickly
The moment I decide not to abandon me

I realized that to be with him, I’d have to change, to become a beta version of myself, pun intended. To earn back his love, I’d have to shed the scared little girl inside and be the woman I’ve always wanted to be. I don’t know if I have the strength to do that, but I know I’m willing to try, even if he’s not there at the end of my journey. I owe it to myself. And after all the hell I’ve put him through, I know I owe it to him.

♫ So unsexy ♫ Alanis Morissette ♫