As the oldest part of the Bible states, the internet giveth, and the internet maketh you crazy. Confession: I spent like 17 years in Catholic School without actually cracking a Bible but I know it's gotta be in there somewhere, and if it isn't…we need to update that thing ASAP.

Now, the internet has brought me many great things. A photo of a hedgehog giving a thumbs up, which is in a folder labeled FOR EMERGENCY USE. My late husband, who wooed me through @ messages on Twitter before walking across a crowded room to introduce himself like I'd recognize him from a teeny-tiny avatar photo. Most of my wardrobe. Several close, personal friends and at least one legit troll (mama, I've made it).

It has also brought me a recurring eye twitch, a near-constant sense of anxiety, and a skewed sense of self-worth.

When I find my thumb operating with a mind of its own, tapping social media icons on my phone repeatedly, with no idea what it's looking for, I know I've got a case of The Internets.

When that happens—when I find my thumb operating with a mind of its own, tapping social media icons on my phone repeatedly, with no idea what it's looking for, when I find myself conflating social media likes with my actual human value—I know I've got a case of The Internets. It's basically like the flu for both your body and self-esteem, and it's transferrable via smartphone and immune to any form of hand sanitizer.

I caught my first case of The Internets in 2011. It wasn't my fault, I swear. I was careful. I kept my phone in my purse during dinner. I cherished my real-life relationships. I did yoga. I had yet to become a published author (brag) whose husband's public death meant that the internet was 1) my connection to a lot of humans going through similar terrible things and 2) basically a part of my livelihood. But years before all this, when social media was in its infancy and Twitter seemed like a small town and we were all still very into live-tweeting conferences like anyone who isn't at your local marketing meet-up gives a rip about 140 characters of a PowerPoint they'll never see in real life, I signed up for a service that would tell me when people unfollowed me.

I don't know why I did it. Nobody followed me in the first place, and everyone who did follow me was someone I knew personally. What feedback could that service provide, except that someone had decided that me and my 140 characters of sparkling wit didn't meet their standards?

I almost deleted the first notification email, part of my daily deletion of all promotional emails, but I paused and opened it, just wondering what it would tell me about my robust Twitter presence, which had ballooned to upwards of 100 followers.

I'd gained three followers (!!!!) the day before. And I'd lost one. A woman I knew personally. There was nothing to do but archive the email for future reference, and then check her current follow list, where she was still following my sister, my cousins, my husband, and all our mutual friends. Well, okay then. Social media is a personal choice and you can and should curate your feed to your liking but hey, why not check to see if she had deleted me on Facebook, too, right? She had. Again, not my sisters or cousins or husband or the many friends we had in common…but me. ME. ME, who tweeted such luminous gems of wisdom as "thought I wore a dress to work today but it turns out it's a shirt, now Aaron has to bring me a new outfit." Who in their right mind would not want to read jewels like the below while they pretend they don't bring their phone into the bathroom to scroll Twitter as they pee?

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I let this new information burn me. Her unfollow and unfriending clearly meant that there was something wrong with me, something I hadn't seen before, something I could only find out through obsessing over it. This train of thought ran through my mind at night: I tried to understand what about me was so offensive, so wrong, that this person wouldn't want me in their phone. What I should have been doing was realizing that this was a person I'd met in real life a handful of times, who had never been to my home, who didn't know my middle name or the fact that kiwis make my mouth itch. In other words, not a friend. A person I barely knew. A person who should not have been keeping me up at night when there were so many other more worthwhile things I could have been worrying about.

My undiagnosed case of The Internets elevated my blood pressure, lowered my self-esteem, and could only be cured by some perspective, which meant unsubscribing from that awful service, logging out of Twitter and Facebook and handing the keys to my best friend, and remembering that there was big wide world outside of my phone and computer screens, filled with people who actually knew and liked me, for the most part.

The most important thing you need to know about The Internets is that as a disease, it is resilient and you are never truly inoculated from it. It's not like chicken pox. It's going to come back for you someday. You'll think you're perfectly healthy, and then you'll find yourself in a Facebook comment fight with a pizza delivery man whose response to something you wrote online about your dying husband is to tell you he hopes you die of cancer. I say that just as a general example and also, because it happened to me and I found myself deep, deep in his photos, wondering why this strange man, who knew me 0.0 percent, would wish me dead.

I knew, when I was replying to the comment, and then replying again, watching the minutes until daycare pickup tick until they passed me by, that I was not living my best life. I was not living any kind of life. I was in the midst of an ugly, feverish bout of The Internets, and I needed help. Fast. This could not be what Mary Oliver envisioned for me when she personally asked me in her poem "The Summer Day": "tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" This could in no way be what Jesus would do if he had Facebook (although, again, I haven't really read the Bible so if I'm wrong, let me know).

The problem with the internet is that it all feels real. Real people type these things into their phones and their laptops. But the environment itself is just…not. Without the internet to bring this flaming bag of dog poo to my door, or to present me with alternate Friday Night Realities for me to envy, none it was actually there. None of it—not even a guy who insisted I should die of cancer because he didn't like my writing—was more real than the friends who had asked to meet for dinner that night, the man who falls asleep next to me at night even though I wear my high school retainer, or the little boy who loves me and was still waiting for me to pick him up from daycare.

It was a sunny Friday, one of like 10 temperate days we're given in Minnesota in spring, and I had a choice: I could choose to let myself simmer in the cesspool side of social media like it was a Holiday Inn hot tub in rural Iowa, or I could, you know, go live my actual life.

Without the Internet to bring this flaming bag of dog poo to my door, or to present me with alternate Friday Night Realities for me to envy, none it was actually there.

I picked up my three-year-old from day care (15 minutes late, sorry buddy!). In the car, he rolled down the window to feel the wind run through his outstretched baby fingers. Somewhere in my phone was a sad, angry man who thought I should die from cancer, but here? There was only us, and the sunshine, and the promise of frozen chicken nuggets when we got home. That knot of anger and anxiety inside of me untied a little bit, and then entirely, and now I can write this piece without feeling it recoil inside of me.

I want to be clear about one thing: I love the internet. But the things we love aren't always good for us, or I'd be able to eat rice pudding for every meal and go in the sun without SPF 100 on. When the thing we love isn't loving you back, the only choice we have is to let it go, to immerse yourself in real life. In people who truly know you and have hugged you in person and smelled your armpits when you aren't sure if the shirt you're wearing needs to be washed or if you can "get away with one more wear." Scenery you can enjoy without hashtagging it. Coffee you can drink instead of Instagramming first.

I'm not an insane person who wants you to return to the '90s and only communicate via email and AIM (although that's a big-time fantasy of mine and if you want in on my commune, let me know very soon). Just for long enough to remember that the best thing about real life is what's actually real.