Ask Aunt Dorcas: Wedding Preps, Screen Addictions and Diverse Readers

Aunt Dorcas and Nephew Conrad, at the Smucker Christmas dinner.
It is exactly as it appears.
Dorcas was tying her shoe and asking personal questions, and Conrad was skillfully avoiding them.
Shortly thereafter, he began dating a lovely young lady, and Dorcas was as surprised as anyone.

Q: How are the wedding preparations coming?

--Curious in Columbus

A: Actually, dear Readers, I made up that question myself because I felt like talking about the Wedding! Matt and Phoebe stayed with the original date of June 14 and will get married in a farmer's field west of here. They'll have a limited number of guests seated on chairs and everyone else in cars, listening to the ceremony on an FM frequency. 

I've had lots of time to think as I planted the garden and cleaned the oven this week* and decided to tackle the questions that follow.

*because one's son can't get properly married if the oven is dirty.

Q: I spend WAY too much time on my phone on YouTube/Instagram, etc. to the point where I sometimes don’t go to sleep until 4 in the morning. I just can’t stop. Help!

--Sleepless in Sugarcreek

A: I’m so proud of you for putting your situation into plain words, admitting your helplessness, and asking for help.

I don’t think I’ve ever been on my phone until 4 a.m., but I’ve had times and periods of being online way too much. Here are some things I’ve learned and observed about screen addiction. I also learned some of this from a young man named Justin Doutrich who did a lot of studying on the subject of addictions and shared it at church.

1. You are not alone. Many many people feel the same way you do: I just can’t stop!

2. You’ve taken the huge and significant step of saying the truth out loud. Applause for you!

3. In one sense, of course people can stop, in the moment. If they smell smoke, they can quit scrolling and run. But in a very real sense, you are absolutely right: you can’t stop. It is an addiction involving many of the same patterns and brain chemicals as an addiction to alcohol or eating or hoarding. The habit becomes bigger than you can handle on your own.

2. Addictions involve a chemical called dopamine. It gives you a happy little boost. When you get a message on Instagram or get notified of a new video on a channel you follow, your brain gets a little squirt of dopamine. Soon, you get addicted to that little kick. You crave it more and more, but it takes more and more visual input to get the same boost. So you scroll and scroll until 4 a.m.

3. Your experience shows that YouTube and Instagram are working exactly as they were designed to. I am not kidding. They were specifically designed to get you hooked, just like the nicotine in cigarettes was calculated to get people addicted. In both cases, it’s about money. Online sites live on advertising which is driven by clicks.

4. Isolation, guilt, and shame are a big part of any addiction. What a failure you are, what a bad excuse for a Christian, an adult, a mom, whatever. So you try and try to do better, but keep failing. What if someone finds out? So embarrassing!

Speaking the truth and admitting you have a problem is a huge and important step. Asking for help is another. It ends the isolation.

5. That habit/addiction has actually made physical changes in your brain. So changing your situation will involve training new pathways in your brain. It’s hard, but it can be done as you make better choices, over and over.

6. My theory is that certain types of brains are more susceptible to screen addictions and have more trouble undoing the damage. I’ve always had the ability to get utterly lost in whatever I was reading. So I’d be dusting the living room on a Saturday morning at age 12, and I’d pick up a Family Life magazine and start reading. Before long I would be so immersed I’d forget about the dusting, the rest of my chore list, and all the fun things I had hoped to do that day.

A long time later I would come out of the fog and realize I had been reading for a very long time, and the free time I had hoped for was unlikely to happen after all. So then, of course, I’d feel so disappointed and berate myself and resolve to do better, only to do it all over again the next Saturday.

Reading things online has the same effect. I can read an article and go clicking on to the next one, so utterly absorbed that I have no sense of time passing. If you have that sort of brain, I sympathize. Recognizing this weakness is important.

7. Castigating yourself and feeling bad won’t go far in making lasting change or new grooves in your brain. You need to dig deeper. For example, going online is often an escape from real life. 

So if I’m struggling with too much time on my phone, I ask myself, “What is it about my life that I’m trying to escape?” Often I’m overcommitted and feeling overwhelmed. Sometimes I have disappointment I don’t want to think about, or relationships that aren’t going well. Scrolling through Facebook distracts me from those realities, which feels good for a short time, but doesn’t solve anything.

So I need to work on actually fixing the things I’m trying to escape.

8. Another question to ask is, “Where am I going for comfort, and why?” We are made for community, and we need other people and the connection and belonging they provide.

Ultimately, Jesus is the true source of peace, comfort, belonging, and purpose. In the depths of our souls, only Jesus can truly satisfy those needs.

Going online to meet those needs is idolatry and self-destructive. 

Repentance and God’s forgiveness help to break the power of your addiction.

9. Also ask, “What else is going on in my brain?” When I wake up at 3 a.m. with my thoughts racing and all kinds of regrets about how I mothered 30 years ago, like that time I served the kids a snack and forgot that Emily was still out in her little yellow swing and couldn’t get out, I have to stop the whirling if I want to go back to sleep. What works best is a few minutes of word games on my phone. Somehow that works. I’m ok with that solution as long as it’s only a few minutes and I go back to sleep. If it ever turns into Too Much, I'll have to re-evaluate.

When I find myself zoning out online a lot during the day, especially in fall and winter, it’s a signal that my SAD is getting worse. If I take steps to improve the depression, such as taking walks and taking Vitamin D, I’m far less likely to get lost online.

10. Telling someone about your problem, asking for help, and being accountable are all huge steps in forming new and healthier habits.
I find that not only does too much time online make me feel stupid, but involving others makes me feel silly, like seriously, I can’t control this impulse on my own? 

But it works.

Accountability, for me, generally involves my daughters. I tell one or all of them that I need to be offline for a specific amount of time, and I specify the consequences if I fail. So I might send a group text: “Hey, I have to stay off my phone until 9:00 tonight or I have to put $5 in the girls’ fun money.”

The fun money jar is where we collect money for our annual trips with the three daughters and me.

That all seems ridiculous for an adult woman to have to take such measures, and maybe it’s kind of a dumb consequence. But, like I said, it works. Thankfully, the girls are very chill and non-shaming about it.

You need a person to tell and a silly punishment for them to apply if you mess up. I promise, it helps.

And I hope this post helps you. You’ve already done the hard step of saying the truth out loud. Get some real-life supporters and explore some of those hard questions.

Q: How conscious are you of the reader and the diverse backgrounds and perspectives that they have when you write? And do you reword your thoughts to reach that broad range? 

--Cousin Floyd

A: Interesting questions!

I am quite conscious of my diverse readership, and yes, I’d say I reword my thoughts to reach both the Horning Mennonite housewife in Pennsylvania and the single, secular professor in Eugene.

Someone told me once that you need to assume your readers have enough brains to figure things out. You don’t have to explain every little detail of Mennonite or farm life. Much can be gathered from context.

Thus, I can usually write a story of my mom or grandma, throw in some Pennsylvania Dutch words, and mention Amish customs, and people can get the gist of the story without laborious explanations.

However, some things can’t be easily gathered from context, and I’ve learned by lots of trial and error what they are. After we adopted Steven, I wrote in an article that he “had a heart for animals.” My writing group was confused. They thought it was a cool phrase, but what did it mean, exactly?

Thus I discovered this term was used mostly within the Christian world.

Mennonites talk about VS, coverings, layered desserts, Beachies, the lot, and blowing the pitch. You can’t expect a non-Mennonite reader to track you very well if you don’t explain. So, when I write non-fiction, I'm careful with tossing those terms into a paragraph.

We also refer to whole families by the husband's first name, pluralized, ["Are Johns and Philips coming to the reunion?"] and to ministers by their first name. "Paul is preaching today." No Reverend, Pastor, or even Mr.

However, I’m running into a few quandaries with the fiction I’m working on, because I want it to be authentic without laborious explanations. Maybe Aunt Martha says, “I hear Ellie is going to VS at Hillcrest.” You know that’s authentic cultural language. But Englisch readers won’t know what she’s talking about. It’s tricky and I haven’t found a good way to navigate it all.

[But I think readers can pick up from context that Englisch means non-Mennonite.]

It doesn't usually work the other way, where I explain terms from the Englisch world so that Mennonite readers will understand. As a minority culture, we're all exposed to their language and know enough to get by.

Mostly, though, readers are surprisingly similar at heart, and a good story is universal. If people don't understand all the details, at least they understand the basic plot and the emotions beneath it.

Thanks, Floyd, for being part of that diverse readership.