I’ve been trying to write one of these posts for a while. But what happens when you lose interest in marketing? Because no one’s really fooled about social media, are we? The tech giants use it to gather our data while we use it to market and brand ourselves, posting images of our flawless lives (not), of our art and our causes—which we tend to support these days by hitting Share instead of actually doing anything. 

And by we, I mean me. Although I don’t think I’m alone.

I’m sick of social media. Also tied up in it, addicted, rubbernecking my friends as they travel and camp (in both senses of the word); as they work on their art and in their kitchens. I love to see pictures of their amazing kids and stupidly cute dogs and cats. If I didn’t follow my friends on social media, I’d have little idea what some of them are up to. Insidiously–and that means you, Mark Zuckerberg, looming above this–social media has become the way we keep in touch. 

It’s an interestingly visual, word-lite way, but that’s a digression.

My initial idea was to write about why I haven’t written here lately, saying how busy I’ve been starting a new novel and doing some story-editing in film, meanwhile obsessively cleaning and purging the house, an ongoing project that’s ramped into some serious shedding lately. 

It sounds so desperately focused and on-trend (purging!) and it’s all true. But to write about it in the usual online style feels painfully self-congratulatory and leaves out the hesitations and second thoughts and flat-out failures in a way that I increasingly dislike.

My family doctor isn’t just sick of social media, she hates it. She has several patients with MS, including my husband, and says that scrolling through their social media feed sends some of them spiralling into depression. 

That’s not true of my husband, by the way. He’s a happy Twitter addict. 

But our doctor says that when they go on social media, many of her other patients are too relentlessly reminded of how much they can’t do anymore, and how hard the rest of their lives have become. By which she doesn’t mean they have trouble backpacking around Patagonia, but that they get exhausted riding the bus. It’s hard to head out impulsively for dinner in a mobility device that can’t get into most restaurants. Other peoples’ lives look so glossy on Instagram and Facebook that some feel their own shrivel in comparison, desiccate, and as the wind rages, they risk blowing away like dust. 

Posts like this can be part of that. They aren’t always openly self-congratulatory, but look at the self-deprecation and reveals of romantic angst you find online in, say, in the Sunday New York Times: those Modern Love essays to which I’m also addicted. Many of them are a definition of the humble brag, a term that took off when social media did. It often strikes me that the writers’ minor-key love problems take place against some pretty major-key backgrounds. “Then I flew to Paris/moved to a mountainside in Colorado/took an IT job in San Francisco and…”

Of course you did. Marketing, marketing: since the writer’s angsty self-deprecation is often set beside a short author bio that says something like, “(The writer) lives in Chicago. Her first/second/third novel will be published next week.” 

So here’s a problem she’s dredged up to get her name in The Times. Usually not too messy a problem, not in public. Unless, of course, it’s so shockingly messy that the writer looks a train wreck, which is excellent publicity. Because ordinary life is boring. Or at least, even those of us without MS find that our unvarnished lives look depressingly banal set against a social media scroll—which includes the highly-edited posts we put up ourselves. 

So where’s the truth in what I’ve been doing lately? What happens if I’m honest?

For one thing, my novel hasn’t been going very well. I like the first sentence—which I just typed in here and then deleted, not being ready to put it out there. But trust me when I say it’s a good first sentence and that the novel goes downhill from there. I’m having trouble getting the tone right. The vocabulary right. The pacing right. I’ve got my main characters and setting. But the story? Nowhere near.

Meanwhile, the feature film I was story-editing? The screenwriter and I killed ourselves trying to get a good second draft, sometimes working past midnight for a couple of weeks before a Telefilm Canada deadline. Then the producer pulled the application shortly after submitting it. Not because of the quality of the script, but because of other producer-y concerns that raised their heads, meaning that Telefilm-funded paycheques won’t be going out anytime soon. 

That’s all pretty normal. Struggling with the first draft of a novel is normal. Both projects will go ahead. The novel certainly, and the film—well, the script will get rewritten again, but whether the film gets made is always another question. (I’d like a few late nights back, please.)

Purging is my other recent preoccupation, and I could go on about that, too. Instead, I think I’m going to write about something that happened on the subway last week. 

The car was fairly crowded but I got a seat. A woman sitting kitty-corner by the window caught my eye.

“That’s a nice skirt,” she said.

“Oh, thank you,” I replied. “It’s just new, and I’m pretty happy with it.”

After a moment’s pause, she said, “I wonder if you can help me. I just got out of hospital”—showing me a plastic wrist band—“and I’m pregnant, and I don’t have any food in the house. If you could spare me some money…”

She was a big woman but I didn’t think she looked pregnant. Her belly was large but it wasn’t high and tight, and she registered as being in her late forties, beyond having children. I assumed she was a panhandler and this was her line—her lie—and I said, “I’m sorry.”

A few minutes later, the train went in and out of a station, and a woman walked over to hold the nearest pole. She was wearing a long white jacket-y thing with metal studs.

“That’s a nice—what do you call it,” the kitty-corner woman said. 

“My duster, yes,” the other woman said. “Thanks. You’d be surprised: it didn’t cost very much.”

A pause. “I wonder if you can help me. I just got out of hospital”—showing the plastic wrist band—“and I’m pregnant, and I don’t have any food in the house. If you could spare me some money…”

Then it was my stop and I got off. 

Why am I writing this? Because I don’t think I behaved very well. It wasn’t a pretty-pretty social media moment with all the rough edges and ambivalencies sanded off. The woman could have been both large and pregnant, two or three months. Her life was obviously hard and she wasn’t necessarily too old to have kids. She might have aged earlier than people with more money. And I don’t know if that was a hospital band, but it might have been, and I would guess that if her fridge wasn’t empty, it was pretty close. 

The fact is, I never know how to respond to panhandlers. I’m bad at it, I often get flustered, either walking by them or fumbling out some coins that never seem to add up to very much. Which is to say, there’s no flattering, affirming narrative to what happened, but most of life is like that, and I’m in the mood to acknowledge it. 

There’s also the fact I was leaving a supermarket yesterday at four in the afternoon, walking down a ramp to the parking lot behind a tall white-haired man I would guess to be in his seventies. A very skinny, jerky-moving woman came up and started following behind his right elbow. 

“Excuse me, sir. Excuse me?”

I registered her as a panhandler and maybe he did, too. He ignored her and kept walking, but she was persistent.

“Excuse me, sir. Excuse me?”

When he continued to ignore her, the woman didn’t turn to me, but insisted on following the elderly man.

“Excuse me, sir. Excuse me. I could give you so much pleasure. I could give you so much pleasure. I really could, sir.”

The man walked on without breaking stride, reaching a woman his age waiting at the bottom of the ramp who looked as if she was his wife. Seeing her, the cracked-out woman drifted back toward the supermarket doors.

“Does that kind of thing really happen?” the wife asked.

As she says.

Lesley Krueger’s latest novel is Mad Richard, from ECW Press, which you can download here.