While walking home on Thursday night, I was having a panic attack. It was one of many I had last week after a shooting in my hometown, and days spent of obsessively Twitter searching “trump dayton visit” had fried my brain and body. Beyond running those searches, everything else felt impossible; I kept doing them despite it making me feel like trash. In between texting my boyfriend to ask if he needed anything from the shop and googling “how many panic attacks is too many” and “panic attacks vs nervous breakdown”, a friend DMed me an article on Twitter from Mother Jones – a group interview with writers Ashley Feinberg, Jenny Odell, Mike Isaac, and Jia Tolentino. In the piece, headlined “'This Shithole Made Me': 4 Extremely Online Writers on How the Internet Broke Our Brains and How We Can Unbreak Them”, the writers talked about their fantasies of logging off forever, and cutting their most toxic internet habit: spending time on Twitter.
