The Adjustment

Whenever something is taken away from us, we naturally have a hard time adjusting to whatever it is not being there.

Here’s an example:

When I was in middle school, I wasn’t the best behaved kid, so this resulted in me getting in trouble a lot. My main form of punishment would be getting my phone taken away. For a kid in middle school, this is the absolute worst thing in the world. To be honest, I don’t even know why it was the worst thing in the world because looking back, it wasn’t like I was missing out on anything. I still got to see my friends and I was still able to play music and softball, so why did losing my phone for maybe two days seem like such a big deal to me?

In Feed, a young adult novel about earth 100 years in the future where there is a chip installed in almost everyone’s brain which acts as a computer, all of the young character’s feeds get hacked and shut down. They have absolutely no clue what to do when they lose their feeds. They have a hard time adjusting to the fact that the feed is no longer there. They actually have to talk without using the chat feature on their feed. Crazy, right?

I began to notice a certain relationship between the way I felt when I got my phone taken away and how Titus reacted when his feed was shut off. It was kind of like we reacted in stages.

Stage 1 – Shock. Picture this: You’re 13 years old again and you just got into a huge fight with your parents about something very minor, like not doing your daily chores. They say “give me your phone” multiple times and you resist and resist. Finally, you hand over that device and just sit there staring at a wall, a painting, or anything really. You’re just in shock that this actually happened. You feel like your entire life just got taken away from you and now you’re just sitting there. Every thing is dead silent. For Titus, this shock was more of a feeling of fear. He just woke up not being able to connect to the feed at all, which is not normal for him. He even says, “Everything in my head was quiet. It was fucked” (Anderson 44). He was shocked and scared that something that has been a part of him all of his life was gone all of a sudden.

Stage 2 – Denial. Now, denial is something that either hits you soon after shock or takes a little bit of time before it starts to affect you. For me, the denial would start the night after the punishment. I would wake up and automatically reach for my phone to see what I missed while I was sleeping. For Titus, not only denial, but also confusion, begin to set in pretty soon after he wakes up without the feed. The denial seemed to set in after Titus and his friends find out that the hacker was identified. Not only did the denial begin to set in, but Titus was still in shock. He says that they "were frightened, and kept touching [their] heads" (Anderson 46). Titus and his friends touching their heads is just like me trying to grab my phone when it isn't there. For both of us, that realization of not having "the thing that made our world go 'round" was the worst part of denial.

Stage 3 – Yearning. In the days in between when I would get my phone taken away and when I got it back, the sense of yearning for having my phone was very strong. I would feel physically sluggish because I wasn't connected. Titus was yearning for the feed so much that he was thinking about it all the time. On page 47, he even says that he misses the feed. He started reminiscing on all of the old feeds that used to exist, like the computer for example.

Stage 4 – Acceptance. Finally, I would just accept the fact that my phone is gone. When I say gone I mean like gone for good and never getting it back. Of course I would accept the fact that my phone was gone right before I would get it back, which wasn't a bad thing. Titus' acceptance begins on page 57 when he and his friends begin to blow needles through tubing at a skinless anatomy man. Titus' acceptance lasted for longer than one would think, but the longer it lasted, the more he seemed to enjoy not having the feed.

Stage 5 – Normality. The day that my phone was put back into my hand, it was like a weight was lifted off of my shoulders. It was like finding the missing puzzle piece to a puzzle. For Titus, getting the feed back seemed like the greatest thing that ever happened to them. Titus says, "It came down on us like water. It came down like frickin' spring rains, and we were dancing in it" (Anderson 70). I think that those two lines are a great description of what it felt like for Titus and his friends to get their feeds back.

As cheesy as this whole post sounds, this is actually how I felt when I was in middle school. I'm sure a lot of you that are reading this probably felt the same way back then. Although I had a life before technology and knew what it was like to not have that resource, I still had an extremely hard time adjusting, so I can't imagine what it would be like to have technology implanted into my brain and have it as a permanent part of my life and then just completely lose it. 

-Emily C. Prompt 2

Anderson, M.T. Feed. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick, 2002. Print.