When I leave the house, I try to remember three things: my phone, my wallet (attached to my keys) and my water bottle.
The wallet and keys are neutral tools, used for purchasing, locking, unlocking and other mundane tasks. You might assume the same neutrality for the phone and water bottle, but you’d be mistaken. The phone is born of evil, incessantly chirping, full of emails, luring me to the internet’s rage machines, lurid yet hypnotic. It pilfers my attention and casts it toward both vacuous trivia and insurmountable despair, usually for commercial gain.
Yet if my phone is the devil on one shoulder, my lavender 32-ounce water bottle adorned with bird and hot dog stickers is an angel on the other, turning my attention inward. Take care of yourself, it says. Be present. Check out these cute stickers that your nice friends gave you. When was your last break? Would you like a little drop of the source of all life on Earth?
I was delighted that a librarian at the Wilder Club & Library recently called her canteen an “emotional support water bottle,” a sign that she didn’t consider me crazy for showing up to look for my own misplaced vessel despite her colleagues’ fruitless searches. I, too, had adopted the term after it was popularized on TikTok in recent years, inspiring dozens — probably hundreds — of “emotional support water bottle” stickers on sites like Redbubble and Etsy.
Interviewing a psychologist, a licensed mental health counselor and others, Yahoo Health wrote last year that some people “form a personal connection to their water bottles” and might benefit “from the comfort or attachment of carrying around the same item regularly,” providing an appealing sense of control in uncontrollable times. One student told Sacred Heart University’s student newspaper, “Honestly, if I forget my water bottle at home, I know it’s going to be a bad day.” (If you find this far-fetched, consider a gut check: Most, though certainly not all, of the people setting this trend are women, whose perspectives are so often dismissed.)
I’d left my water bottle at the library a few nights earlier during Vermont Public’s truncated screening of “Join or Die,” a great documentary (edited by Vermonter Chad Ervin) available in full on Netflix. The film essentially adopts the thesis of Robert Putnam’s 2000 book “Bowling Alone,” which correlated Americans’ participation in all kinds of clubs with our trust in democracy, making the case for their intrinsic link. Putnam showed that both metrics rose steadily through the mid-20th century (lots of social groups, including bowling clubs, and robust faith/participation in civic life) and have been crashing ever since (more people bowling alone, lately attached to our phones, our politics defined by polarization.)
Vermont Public’s screening was followed by a social hour in which we were encouraged to meet strangers and share interests, perhaps spawning new clubs. Nobody seemed like the water-bottle-stealing type, which would be gross not just morally but germily. So after coming up empty at the library, I took to an Upper Valley Facebook group with 30,000 members and penned a plea:
LOST – emotional support water bottle – last spotted at wilder library during “join or die” movie screening – friendly but shy – does not respond to commands – if seen, do not chase – contact the owner (me) – thank you
To avoid appearing lazy, I ditched the “missing pet” framework on the Hartford Listserv and wrote instead about getting “ghosted” by my water bottle after a two-year relationship. I’d been “putting myself out there and getting to know other water bottles,” I wrote, “but it’s just not the same.”
Reactions poured in, showing I’d struck a nerve, though not the angry kind so typical of social media. “Oh god I feel this in my bones!” one person wrote on Facebook. “I hope you are reunited shortly!” I grew obsessive about solving the mystery, ignoring some embarrassment to exhaust every lead, even contacting the Vermont Public event host and insisting on a second search of my friend’s car that we’d taken to the screening.
No dice. All emotional support appeared lost, but six days after the movie and three days after the Facebook post, I got an email that made me shriek. “Huge news!,” another Wilder librarian wrote. “The water bottle turned up!” It was perched obviously in the auditorium when she arrived, leading us to believe that someone in one of the prior days’ private events had unearthed it and left it where it could not be overlooked. I soon posted a rather goofy selfie with the water bottle in the Facebook group, which prompted some 350-plus positive reactions, mostly from women, mostly strangers. “Many of us felt your loss,” one commenter wrote. Another said she hoped to update a customer with whom she’d chatted about the ordeal. My husband texted me that “multiple people have told me how relieved they are,” and when I arrived at a dermatology appointment a few days later, I was greeted with hearty congrats.
But the reaction that stuck with me was this one, written on Facebook by Ruth Powell Dougher: “This is the kind of social media I’m interested in.” Since then, I’ve thought a lot about the essence of Dougher’s comment, the irony of Facebook as a connector and divider, the evils of my phone, the emotional support of my water bottle, the message of “Join or Die,” and the resonance this silly little saga had with a wide range of my neighbors.
A few days later, at the Listen Thrift Store, I stumbled upon a used copy of Putnam’s follow-up, “The Upswing,” which details how Americans came together in the early 1900s “and how we can do it again,” and took it as some kind of hopeful sign, buying it for $1.
Is there a through-line to it all? A neatly packaged takeaway? I’m not so sure, but I can tell you I wrote my name and phone number on my water bottle to try to avert an encore. If I lose it again, though, I know there are a bunch of people who are willing to help me find it, and I’m grateful that they’re here.
Maggie Cassidy is a freelance writer, former editor of the Valley News and former managing editor of VtDigger. She lives in White River Junction.