Phone addiction, Stanley stans and the out-of-office message I struggled to send

About that "unresolved" "family situation" ...

On Wednesday, I sat down to answer emails for the first time since December 19. Since that date, I've been hiding behind a vaguely worded out-of-office message that I composed in a hurry on my phone before collapsing into grief. I lost another pregnancy that day — the third in a row. And this one far enough along to look at least like the Rorschach blot of a baby when we viewed it on the ultrasound.

How do you euphemize that type of loss? Sanitize it for polite, professional communication? I've come up with a few phrases that I deployed that afternoon, and again as I responded to my backlog of messages.

"We got some bad personal news," I sometimes wrote. Or: "I recently learned of a health problem." Maybe we were going through a "tough period," the origin of the toughness left to imagination.

More often than not, I told acquaintances, editors, professional contacts and even personal friends that I would be away from work and email contending with "a difficult family situation."

In hindsight, I wonder at my choice of words — they now seem to connote something removed from me, a planned intervention or someone else's divorce. They seem to suggest that something bad has happened, but nothing so bad as to keep me from responding — thanks for your patience! — in due course.

Writing such emails requires you, a tearful puddle, to hold many competing motives in your head at once. Most importantly, you can't reveal too much information in this type of email, because that could make you look vulnerable or needy, and need makes people uncomfortable. In their discomfort, people will say cruel things. They’ll say too much or not enough. Perhaps they’ll say the right thing to your face, but in secret decide that you are not the competent, reliable professional they thought.

I am uncomfortable too, of course — with my cramps, with my crying, with this level of disclosure. There’s no telling what I’ll say when I’m trying to disguise my discomfort to assauge yours. “If you don't laugh you'll cry,” I say, reflexively, when my miscarriage jokes don't hit their marks. Like: No, mom, I can get lunch today — I just saved a quarter of a million dollars! Or: Insurance won't cover the mifepristone? That's a real miscarriage of justice!

Sometimes I cry and laugh at the same time, further discomfiting my audience.

And yet, and yet, modern etiquette demands a damn good excuse for taking two weeks off. If I still worked a normal 9-to-5, I would have been expected to meet with HR and document the extent of my devastation by now. They would want a note from my OB, sure, but probably also from my therapist, confirming that I am in fact really fucking sad and the sadness could spoil my work product.

Even our laws grant no quarter to grief: There is no federal right to bereavement leave, and only two states grant leave for miscarriage. My interlude is actually a sign of my privilege, so I feel compelled to apologize for it.

On second thought, no — I don’t apologize. If anything, the universe owes me that. Instead, I simultaneously explain and obfuscate the reasons for my absence: Some unnamed "matters" did not "resolve" on "quite the timeline we expected."

Almost everyone responds the same way to that line, perfectly polite and mechanical: "I hope your situation has resolved."

Thank you. It hasn’t at all!

At moments, I am tempted to reply honestly — but it seems unkind to put someone else in the position of untangling all these behavioral codes. And I’m exhausted by the ignorance I understand I’ll likely have to overcome. “Thanks, but actually these things don’t resolve themselves — I’ll need medication or a surgical procedure.”

“Thanks, but actually the first round of medication didn’t work as expected.”

“Thanks, it did appear to work this time — but actually they recommend fetal tests after your third. And because I passed my miscarriage at home, I have to spend the next five hours driving lab-to-lab in search of one that will take an embryo in an old cooler.”

“Thanks, but actually those genetic test results came back early, and they unexpectedly told me the baby’s sex, and that caused me to cry openly in the Target shampoo aisle so I need the next two hours to lay motionless in bed.”

“Thanks, but actually this experience has forced me to confront some larger questions around my identity, my future and mortality in general, and having done that I hope you can understand that I care less about this work than I did three weeks ago.”

Even here, in this small, siloed newsletter that represents my own personal internet fiefdom, I worry that my candor will strike the wrong note. You may recognize the about-face from our last (pre-written) edition, when I wrote that “Links will likely be off next week attending to” — wait for it! — “a family matter.”

I don’t want you to think I’m looking for sympathy. Sympathy actually embarrasses me a bit. If anything, I’m writing to underscore the absurdity, the heartlessness, of this mutual charade wherein we all play down our grief, we keep its depths secret.

After all, everyone has lost someone. Everyone has at one time been lost themselves. Everyone has drawn their curtains against the 9 a.m. sun to better work their way through both a pint of Perry's ice cream and Outlander’s outlandish first season.

Fine, okay — that last one’s just me. But I think that my point still stands. Thanks for your patience with my delayed response. I’ve been dealing with a difficult miscarriage.

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If you read anything this weekend

“A Second Life for My Beloved Dog,” by Charlie Warzel for The Atlantic. I didn’t set out looking for grief reads this week, and lord knows you probably don’t want to start your year with them, but two perfect little gems came down my RSS this week, like rare gifts from an unfeeling internet. Both involve the way our phones mediate mourning, which is not something I think I’ve experienced in any major way myself. First up: Warzel recounts how his iPhone’s Photo Shuffle feature helped him process the loss of his dog by prompting unexpected moments of gratitude and reflection.

“Flipping Off Death,” by Daniel Kolitz for Dirt. I almost never share stories behind hard paywalls. This, with apologies, is an exception. But I think even the free preview is a lovely meditation on technology and memory, and it will be (ahem) abundantly obvious why it resonated with me:

I was typing out these phrases and I was thinking: Jon is dead. I typed: exploitable vulnerabilities. I thought: dead. I typed: AI-enhanced detection tools perfectly suited to the needs of the cloud-first modern enterprise. I thought: I am losing my fucking mind. I wrote an email to the client, something like: sorry, my friend died, going to need a few more hours on this. It was too much to share, I wasn't thinking straight. The client replied promptly. They said: No problem!

“Everyone Is On Their Phones. But Is It Really Phone Addiction We’re Experiencing?,” by Simar Bajaj for The Guardian. And now for some counter-programming: Phones are actually bad! I’m being flip, of course — this piece is a deep and nuanced exploration of how our definitions of “addiction” are evolving, and how digital “addictions” (phones, social media, video games) fit into that. I had wondered about many of these questions last year, when a boatload of states sued Meta for addicting teens to its products. It seems wiser, per Bajaj, to rely on more precise/less medicalized language — less “addiction,” more “excessive usage.”

“The Perfect Webpage,” by Mia Sato for The Verge. I think most of us understand, at least abstractly, that SEO tactics dictate the form of much of the stuff we encounter online: the long essays on food blogs, the needless FAQs, the keyword-clogged meta titles and headlines. But for a comprehensive understanding of how Google’s search guidelines shape the design, structure and content of virtually every website you read, spend a couple minutes with the scrolly interactive that accompanies this story.

“What I Learned Selling a Used Pencil on TikTok Shop,” by John Herrman for New York. The best distillation I have read to date on “the chaos grid” that is TikTok Shop — and, for better or worse (but mostly for worse), an ever-widening swath of American e-commerce.

👉 ICYMI: The most-clicked link from our last newsletter — a round-up of great reads from the past year — was the amazing, semi-fictional (?) short story “The Hofmann Wobble.”

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Postscripts

Dream tech. Annotation girlies. A Twitter remembrance from an employee. Dating apps may be expensive and bad, but there’s no way LinkedIn is next in matchmaking. What the hell happened to Quora? Is “Twitter Explodes With Antisemitic Misinfo” even news these days? Why those g-d Stanley tumblers are INESCAPABLE rn and how phones survived the fall from that Alaska Airlines plane.

The future of: libraries (exciting), Buzzfeed (uncertain) and global elections (alarming, untrue). AI has now come for DJs and translators, x2. The truly deranged culture of Facebook’s “bad nanny” posts. The fascinating rise of the viral “restock.” Last but not least: “Age-old observations about the narcissistic tendencies of travel … have only been amplified by digital phenomena.”

That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards.

— Caitlin