In 2009 I had a newborn, a recently vacated teaching position, and all the slow-rolling expansive days that come with those things. My cell phone could only call, text, and take blurry pictures. I had a first-generation iPod Touch, with a handful of poorly designed word game apps that I would play, in total darkness, while nursing my daughter at 3am. At some point, I remembered my login information for Facebook, a social media account I had neglected for 2+ years, and reconnected with someone from high school. We were not friends, but we could have been. As it turned out, she had two young children, and was navigating life as a stay at home mom in a state far from our hometown. She was one of the few people from high school who had babies at this point in time. “I have that same Boppy cover!” one of us commented on the other’s picture. Which Boppy cover? The peas in the pod one.
When the day came when she sent me a request, via Facebook, to do something in FarmVille, I just accepted it. Why not? She needed a watering can or something. I didn’t know what it was, or that I had just signed up to be a farmer, or that I would now end my nights by clicking on crops to harvest what I had planted the night before (or to clear away the dead plants I thought I would remember to harvest in time). I would send my high school acquaintance fertilizer or whatever, and she would send it to me.
The thing about FarmVille is that at a certain point, you have to be willing to connect with more friends. Otherwise, you can’t do anything. As it turned out, I had a few friends who played (it was easy to find them – all those requests for water or gnomes) and I had a friend whose mom played it. It was enough people to get that larger piece of land, level up, and keep planting those meditatively perfect clickable squares.
Until it wasn’t.
I wasn’t the type to suggest that anyone should start playing this dumbass game. Even I, a fully devoted FarmVille farmer, wouldn’t send out public requests to help me get something in order to complete my collection of duck statues in order to earn FarmBucks. No way. I’m proud to know my limits.
There had to be some other way. And, because humans are resourceful, creative problem solvers – there was. It was a Facebook page for people looking for more friends to be their FarmVille neighbors. If I was going to expand, I needed some of them. But in order to get these people as my neighbors, we would have to be friends. Connected. While it was easy enough to set privacy controls to limit the access of these people – we would still be connected in a way that I wasn’t sure of. So I had to do some vetting.
After working my way through the comments of people who also needed more neighbors, I settled on the three I would need to unlock whatever it was I was trying to unlock. It my own rose ceremony. I went for someone who appeared to be about my age, with a baby around the age of my daughter, who liked the same music I did. Next, I chose a French woman who would allow me to practice reading French as I scrolled past her posts. Last, I went with a woman who appeared to be very innocuous, perhaps southern, whose profile picture was a pastel and Glamour Shot fuzzy portrait of her and her daughter wearing floppy hats. Their cheeks together, looking not quite in the same direction. There was nothing public in her profile at that time, but I assumed that by friending her I would have to scroll through crock pot recipes or folksy sayings, but that she would always help me with my farm. She just looked that way.
All three accepted my friend request: The mom, the Francophone, and Gail *
Within a few months, my FarmVille farm lay as brown and dead as my actual vegetable garden. Shut down, closed out, over. I still stayed connected to those FarmVille randoms, though. The mom was exactly as I had assumed. I was pleasantly surprised how much college French I remembered. And my southern mom was quiet. An “I love life!” here and there, maybe some “3 day weekend – woo hoos!” That was about it.
And then there was a passing comment about an AA meeting.
That daughter in the profile picture? Looking all of four or five? She had a tenth birthday – but there was never any mention of her or photographs of her.
Every Sunday, Gail posted minute by minute updates about the performance of the Saints, her favorite team. I learned she was a Louisiana native, even though she had since left her family behind there to move farther north.
Sometimes Gail’s family would argue with her, publicly on Facebook posts, about her drinking or sexuality. Rage filled exchanges that Gail would power through and/or instigate. Everyone equally the attacker and the attacked. She would go through periods of high as she attended country music concerts. Periods of low as she struggled to find new places to live. Work seemed to come and go. She shared music videos from YouTube as she was probably watching them in real time. Sobriety would shine down on her through her posts. When that sobriety slipped away, Gail would post photographs with too much cleavage, or typo ridden diatribes against her father.
I knew so much about Gail that I rooted for her, worried about her, and I couldn’t pull myself away from these ups and downs. Was I soaking in the voyeurism of watching someone else’s shit storm? Was I fascinated by the dissonance of being so familiar with someone who I had never met? It was both at the same time, and I would never ever unfriend her.
There were break ups, new puppies, more concerts, a few moves, fights with family, people disowning other people, more poorly lit and angled pictures. Blurry shots of concert tickets. Titled pictures of dogs and cats. Big messes towering on small tables in the background – the traces of depression, addiction, or going through some shit.
One day, late at night, a solid six or seven years since I first farmed side-by-side with Gail, she created a string of posts disowning her father for all time for the way he hated gay people and for his drinking. To which her father noted that she would definitely find herself in hell after drowning in the bottom of a bottle of vodka. Gail retorted that the secrets he had kept about a cousin of hers, and the abuse of that cousin would land him in hell first. They each quoted the Bible to each other – as apparently all people from her hometown know to do during an argument – and then it ended. I tapped through the comments, followed the exchange, and found myself many screens down in the type of mess and slop I had never even encountered secondhand before in my life.
Gail was giving not just me, but everyone she ever dared click +friend on, a reality show. Instead of curating her best life, Gail was waving it all out there proudly. Only it wasn’t actually pride – it just was. Our biology may make it hard to turn away from a crash, but we should be able to overcome that, right?
I didn’t. I kept Gail’s story right where I could see it the next time some shit went down.
I have also watched Teen Mom and Teen Mom 2 since their inceptions, and I don’t mind learning about a Jenelle Eason Instagram melt down the day after it happens. I analyze the relationships on 90 day fiancé as if it’s the item on the top of my to-do list each day. You likely have your own favorite less-than-proud hot mess franchise. But these people are getting paid to live out loud. Gail was just doing it.
And I watched it.
There was a moment in time when Gail settled down and married her long-time girlfriend. They did the things they enjoyed, stuff I would never be able to relate to, but it was one of those sober up moments for Gail. As she did well, it gave her Facebook audience reason to feel less gross about watching the down moments. Every day of sobriety she counted off made us feel like maybe this was the end of the third act. Gail was maybe living up to that pastel profile picture from nearly a decade ago; she was yet to post a crock pot recipe, but her life was the stuff of ordinary: adopted animals, football games, and inside-the-care selfies of her and her wife. They debated a move back to Louisiana.
Although ordinary, Gail’s social media still felt out of place in my feed. There was nothing polished in her crooked and out of focus pictures. Showing off her new tattoo, she called it a “tatoo.” Her food pictures were always captioned with enthusiasm – but they were soggy lumps of southern things, only distinguishable in color: green-ish, dark orange, and beige. The ways in which social media can act as an echo chamber, are complicated by throwing in people you don’t actually know and would never meet otherwise. In between endless screens of art-related memes, links to news analysis, pro-teacher rallying cries, and beautiful vacation (and baby) pictures, you would find Gail’s off-center plate of grits on a scratched table.
Even when Gail was in the biggest upswing of her life, her life could pass for the lowest point of someone else’s. Whose lowest point is our highest?
One morning, Gail woke up to find her wife dead in bed next to her. It was a heart attack in her sleep. The type of thing we probably wish for others: quick, painless, without awareness. But not the type of thing we wish on a recovering addict.
Gail shared updates, minute by minute, of her daily life, thoughts, and struggles. Going through a closet of clothes. Making funeral arrangements without money and with two estranged families. Comforting, and being comforted by, pets. Loneliness. Anger. Regret. Sadness. Gail named exactly what she was feeling, as she felt it.
There wasn’t anything interesting about watching someone else’s life now that it involved this. If you are looking for where my comfort level line is drawn – you found it. What could anyone close to her say or do to keep Gail sober, healing, and ordinary? What could I, a stranger who had seen it all from estrangement to sobriety, do? What is the extent of human responsibility for reaching Gail? Or is it every person for themselves?
A week after the loss of her wife, Gail posted in all caps: FIRST MY WIFE NOW MY DAUGHTER, WHAT NEXT?
As it turned out, her daughter was alive, but apparently had disowned her officially. Not that the two had spoken in nearly fifteen years but… one more thing. One more thing. Gail was right: what next?
Those endless YouTube links started again. Barely coherent posts. We had all seen it before. Family problems. Gail shouting into the void that her family was trying to call social services on her because she was suicidal: “which I’m NOT!” she exclaimed. White text on a hot pink background.
We had all seen this from Gail before. It was the cycle. What hope would someone like Gail have in this world?
In November, I realized I hadn’t heard any outbursts or moments of hope from Gail. Her two favorite walls to bounce off of. I searched for her name on Facebook – purposefully sought out the next season of her reality show. And there it was: Shortly after that last hot pink post, Gail was found dead.
How many people did Gail friend over the years to help her with her FarmVille farm? She still played on and off through the years, even when Facebook got good about hiding those requests. How many more people are like me out there? Watching from all types of distances as Gail’s life of volatility was pinched like a match between the fingers of her circumstance. That was all we will have. That was all she had.
* Name and location changed
Melissa Sharpe 