from my Substack archive: Cindy Phillips, Looking ahead, ten years after, 24 July 2025
One way I’ve come to understand my own condition is to write something and spend a long time revising it. In revising, I teach myself. I find my own information buried in my body. It is still alive until I am not. I paraphrase here the quote from the inimitable Fanny Howe, born in 1940, who died earlier this month, on the 8th of July, just six days before my 10th sobriety anniversary.
On Facebook I was congratulated by people who knew me before, during, and after my mercifully short lapse into alcoholism. I have been privileged to take the first decade of my sobriety in near-solitude, although the jury is still out on the wisdom of implementing that privilege. I seldom visit Facebook these days, so the 40-odd reactions to my sobriety post were a surprise, and the most baffling thing for me to understand, far more than the wonder of never having had to apply a millisecond of the discipline to gain sobriety I was being mistakenly congratulated for – was the gushing gumption of four fake friends who persevere in stalking because they are flying monkeys for people who wish me ill.
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I’d love to write several posts on the miracle of not needing any willpower to stay sober these past 10 years, but in this post I want to explain why I’m leaving Facebook for good after almost 20 years.
For me, the withdrawal from Facebook and Twitter/X, and just recently Instagram, was a matter of survival. I left because social media no longer made sense, or I no longer made sense in it. In solitude I could breathe, regroup, to ration my days and griefs and small joys. Hermit time has its own sacraments. The world shrinks to the size of my desk, or the landscapes of my walks, or to moving from one to another of my collection of mismatched chairs to have morning coffee with my cats. In the quiet, I have found my own voice again, and stopped drowning in others. For me, these past ten years were far from empty. They were filled with learning how to live without the scaffolding of many things, among them pleasing a treacherous audience.
Withdrawal from the madding crowd rewires you. It changes your tolerance for noise, obligation, and – especially –subterfuge and bullshit. So re-entry, when it comes, can feel like friction. I forget how to be casual. I brace for artifice, I fear the exact people I have not missed at all.
There’s vulnerability in reintegrating that no one prepares you for. The world expects a comeback story: brave girl, healed and whole. But often, reintegration is uneven. Some parts of me want to reconnect, others want to run. I am both wiser and more skittish, both grounded and unfit for small talk, it’s too much, too soon, too loud. And then there’s the part no one warns about: my new self no longer fits my old scene. People will want the version of me they remember, not the one I became in the dark. The hardest part of reintegration is resisting the temptation to rehash that version just to belong, to be seen to be back in the groove.
And as my light returns, so do the moths. The watchers. The gossips. The ones who come not to support me, but to take inventory of my joy. Re-entry draws not only old friends, but schadenfreude in fresh lipstick. Some will only love me broken; others will prefer the echo of my silence to the sound of my strength. Their disappointment in my renewal is not my burden to carry.
So I edit my circle. I become deliberate. I practice re-entry like learning a language I once spoke fluently but now have to relearn from scratch, with an accent made rough from lack of exercise.
Writing helps. Blogging helps. Walking helps more than any prescribed medicines or meetings. I look at the world as a flâneuse again, observing from the edges. I speak when I’m ready. I keep the rituals that kept me alive in solitude. I rebuild some bridges, I have learned where it’s safe to cross, and I am aware that the most important people are those who didn’t need notification of my happy anniversary news from Facebook. Still, amongst the profuse Facebook congratulations are the friends with whom I have spoken regularly all along the way. When these loving souls have faithfully read my letters, WhatsApp texts, and rambling blog posts, they’ve seen my words instead of scanning the backgrounds of my spectacularly bad photographs for signs of something with which to titillate their gossip circle.
I write to understand my place in the world past, present, and future. Writing is a discipline from childhood: first feint-ruled Croxley notebooks, every afternoon, while my mother sewed a hem as the rice boiled and we waited in the steamy kitchen for my dad’s car in the driveway. Then Christmas-wrapped, padded plastic cover, purple paisley pattern to keep teenaged secrets warm and safe, a gilt lock so small its key fitted on the thinner-than-a-spiderweb silver chain around my neck under my school shirt, discovery of which would get me detention. Then foolscap pages in high school, in different handwriting from the paisley diary under my pillow at home. Pages and pages of cursive writing, fountain pens and ballpoint; learning theory of writing with structure through essays and comprehension tests on World History, understanding baffling Geography, finding a second voice for myself via boontjie kry sy loontjie and trappe van vergelyking, early experience of wonder at the joining-of-dots by explaining Michelangelo’s influence on styles of European Art, and discovering through 500 compulsory words how Picasso’s Guernica illustrates the futility of War. The long-read blog became my homework with the advent of the internet.
My decade of exile is over, I have had sufficient solitude at my own Walden Pond, and I’ve learned well how much I can live without, and what I don’t need to continue to deny myself. Like Thoreau, I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.
Unlike Thoreau, I find that coming back to the real world is almost as hard as leaving it. To return to people after a long silence. To hold a normal conversation without trying to map, in real time, the vast distance of terrain between where I’ve been and what’s going on in the room. I find myself overstimulated by chatter, inexplicably shy at the clink of cutlery, tongue-tied by the way others seem to exist unselfconsciously in the flow of time, as if their clocks were never interrupted.
Psychologists sometimes call this “re-entry syndrome.” It’s not just astronauts or ex-inmates who suffer it. I’ve felt it after leaving the cult that is AA, after lockdown, after years of worrying, after depression, now after my spell of isolation by choice. It’s part of a bigger process called reintegration: coming back to a world that kept spinning in my absence. The most important and most difficult part of recovery is to change the people, places, and things that drove a soul to despair.
I’m admittedly a loooong, challenging read in a speeding ticker-tape menu of quick bytes, my tribe knows this about me, even those who write privately afterwards to tell me they’re overjoyed I’m writing again although they haven’t a clue what I’m on about and why don’t I write something funny again. Overjoyed, or so fucking chuffed, they write, or so happy and proud of you, they say, and I know it’s love they mean, pure love for me, not motivate by follower-count or empty emojis. Bewildering, inexplicable, but it is that love that has brought me back, and it did so off social media, perpetually, privately.
I treasure my small true circle, and I remind myself daily that not everybody deserves all of me, that’s my new discipline.
Thank you for reading.
Footnotes & Further Reading:
Gilligan, I., & Hopper, E. (2022). Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections. Routledge.
Davis, T. D., & Pinderhughes, R. A. (2020). “Reentry After Isolation: The Psychology of Returning to Society Post-Trauma.” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 30(8), 939–955.
Thoreau, H. D. (1995). Walden and Civil Disobedience (W. Rossi, Ed.). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. (Original works published 1849 & 1854)
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