Last night I was thinking about my relationship with Facebook and I deactivated my account. I’d been thinking about doing that for some time, but I kept postponing it the same way I did back when I used to smoke and thought about quitting.
Lately I had been noticing that I’d be in a bad mood if something I posted didn’t quite get the reception I thought it deserved. But when it did, that didn’t put me in a good mood. I found myself posting stuff without any real reason other than being liked, I guess.
But the thing that did it was that I kept finding myself spending time with my son while constantly looking at my mobile. I felt awful about it and tried to keep it under control, but the habit would always find a way to creep back in.
So I had to do like I did with smoking: I completely and suddenly stopped. And the feeling that something is missing is incredible. This is a real addiction and I’m afraid I’m not even addicted to the degree that so many people are. Scary stuff.
Ok, it’s just this silly thing. I kind of regretting talking about it now because I will now be embarrassed to show it. But a deal‘s a deal. The task was to address a simple, uninteresting topic and create as compelling a text as possible in 400 words. We were tasked to talk about how we ended up in a MA in Journalism and we had to stick to the facts. Here it is:
It only took me twenty two years, one of them living in the Central American country of Belize, two attempts at an undegraduate degree (one successful), two attempts at a graduate degree (both unsuccessful) and some four years of therapy to consider doing the thing I really wanted to do when I was 16.
I come from a small, Portuguese industrial town called Marinha Grande. It’s known for two things: it’s glass making and being so communist that a socialist presidential candidate was once stoned there (something that would eventually and ironically win him the election). A newspaper was something ungodly, the product of some obscure elite’s plan to tell us all we were idiots. Unless, of course, it was a sports newspaper or the Communist Party’s one. There was a disdain for all things intellectual or arty and me, I really liked to write.
At first I would write as a way to make sense of the world around me, and that would help. Then I started developing an interest in the way I was writing and the very act became a vehicle I’d use to escape my working class reality. I’d go to the library and spend days reading books in semi-secret and, with Internet just taking its first steps, I was able to read newspapers, magazines and books from all over the world.
The pressure to become an accountant (four stitches to the knee for clumsily attempting a football tackle meant that was not future for me) mounted and I negotiated and rebelled my way into compromises. There was a journalism programme in a secondary school in Marinha Grande but it was the one farther from where I lived and my father wouldn’t go for it. I ended up finish my undergraduate degree in Sociology after a failed attempt at Political Science. I was dancing around what really interested me hoping I’d grow out of love with it. I was invited and indeed taught at universities in Portugal and Belize, tried unsuccessfully to do a Master’s and a PhD and ended up in Scotland working in call centres. That felt like rock bottom.
I took up therapy until I admitted to myself that what I really love to do is to make sense of the world around me through writing. And show it to people so they can discuss it and tell me why I’m right. Or wrong.