30 Days Away

I did my month of trying to cut down on distractions. It was not what I expected.

Also, I may have stumbled into some sort of midlife crisis. Whoops.

I mean, in some ways it was what I thought it would be. Getting off social media was hard at first, but not because I missed the content. I just missed having something to distract me every time I was un-entertained 30 seconds. But after a month away I think it’s going to be hard to go back, and I’m going to take some time to decide if/where/how I want to be online in that way.

Should I go back enough to use it as a tool for connection and as a way of remembering birthdays? Probably. But I don’t think anyone has missed my little contributions to the noise, so it won’t hurt them if I don’t get back on the notifications hamster wheel just yet.

Quiet mornings were (and continue to be) just as hard as I thought they’d be. I’ve slipped up many times, justifying listening to podcasts or putting on a YouTube video to fill the silence. It’s genuinely painful sometimes to be alone with myself.

And it’s not just in the morning.

Because as it turns out, being alone with your thoughts can be…a lot.

June wasn’t as productive as I’d hoped. I thought that when I had fewer distractions I’d get more work done, and that was true at first.

But a side-effect of not being able to drown my thoughts and numb my feelings with endless TikTok scrolling was that I had to listen to those thoughts and actually feel those feelings. And it turns out that what was hiding under my frantic distraction cravings was a lot of anxiety, depression, and major burnout that I’d been ignoring because it hurt too much to do otherwise.

I realized that I’m tired of forcing myself to do hard mental labour that doesn’t offer much incentive to get it done.

I realized that I’m not enjoying writing anymore, and I need to figure out how to get back to that. I want to be motivated by joy, not negative pressure, and the joy left me a long time ago. This might mean that going forward I take a break from trying to make money from writing and make space for other stuff so I have room to keep creating amazing stories that make my heart sing.

Or whatever my heart used to do when I enjoyed anything, I can’t remember.

And (here’s where the midlife crisis might come in) I realized that the life I’m living doesn’t look much like the one I long for—or maybe that I’m not the person I want to be—and being away from social media with all its temptations to comparison and all its voices telling me what I should want has been helpful in getting a little clarity there.

My thoughts, when I listen to them, pull me in weird directions. Not bad ones, but toward something that aligns better with the me I bump into when I get away from the noise.

No, it’s not a convertible.

But it might be a garden. And learning to be handier around the house. And cooking more mindfully, because as it turns out I enjoy cooking when I’m not just rushing to slap something on the table. And getting more offline. And following inspiration to short stories and books that aren’t “marketable” but that tickle my mind. And possibly evolving into some form of swamp witch, but that’s a “someday” dream.

So no, my “distraction detox” wasn’t the miracle cure I’d hoped for my lack of productivity. I have not finished revisions on Princes & Pawns… haven’t looked at my computer in about two weeks, actually, out of respect for the aforementioned anxiety, depression, and burnout.

But it’s been useful in a very different way.

It’s made me listen to myself, forced me to acknowledge things I wasn’t letting myself feel, and allowed me a bit of space to start exploring how my life (at work and at home) could look a bit more like what I need and a bit less like… well, like me trying to “prove myself” and doing what I keep hearing I should be doing to reach someone else’s idea of success.

That could mean some scary changes, and some exciting ones.

It already means me getting sick enough of my brain fog and headaches (which are another thing I’ve been experiencing more fully for the past month) that I’ve taken two big steps to getting them under control: quitting video games entirely* and overhauling my eating habits to see whether that helps me feel any better.

I still feel stuck, but I feel like it’s a more productive stuck now. I don’t have a map, but it feels like I’m going somewhere.

What a weird adventure.

*after a disastrous experiment that proved to me that they do, unfortunately, trigger migraines and multiple days of mental fog.