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An Update From Hiatus-Land
This is going to be a long post, let's just accept the reality of that at the outset.
The entire time I've been off twitter, I've thought periodically about how exciting and nice it will be to share XYZ thing that I've done with my friends on social media, but now that I've broken my hiatus, I just... Don't want to do that.
I took a hiatus because I believed that the amount of time I was spending on twitter was detrimental to my mental health. I didn't think it was good for me to be exposed to such a constant onslaught of negative political news, fandom drama, and information that was just generally unpleasant to me. And more than that, I feel that twitter use has reframed the way my brain conceives of and processes information. I think in 140-character bursts and my attention span has been slivered down to nothing. I wanted a break from twitter to let my mind rest, and return to a more natural, comfortable baseline state.
So rather than break my friend update into 280-character chunks on twitter, I thought I would write a blog post.
The main thing I want to talk about is how I've been trying to use as much of my hiatus as possible to organize my life so I feel more productive and efficient, and can spend my free time with less worry that I'm forgetting something important and therefore enjoy myself more.
I downloaded a few new life-management type apps, specifically a journaling app, a habit tracker (not habitica, the gamefying aspect is actually horribly counter-productive for me and just stresses me out), and a calendar. It's funny, there are quite a few apps that keep your calendar, checklists, habits, goals, and even let you write journal entries, but all of those are too complex and overwrought for me. I wanted the simplest possible interfaces with only the tools I need, and so... Multiple apps it is.
When I was younger -- like really young, like starting when I was eight years old -- I journaled rigorously, obsessively, in paper notebooks. When I was about thirteen I found ujournal and livejournal, and switched to online. But between livejournal going to shit and all my friends migrating to different alternative sites and beginning to use twitter way more, I fell out of the habit of journaling online about five years ago now.
It's been good to get back into the habit, and it makes me think I could make DW updates a regular part of my life, if that was something friends will be interested in. Maybe weekly, rather than daily? I'd like the incredibly specific personal updates to stay private, lol.
But yeah, just, writing things down, making lists, keeping myself on task so important literal housekeeping gets done and my living space isn't disgusting, has been so good. I've tried to be kind and give myself a break when I don't get EVERYTHING done I had planned for a specific day, so long as I know I genuinely tried and I move it to the next day rather than giving up.
I have also read so, so much during my hiatus.
The thing with twitter is, I use it like a fidget object. Whenever I have a few minutes of free time, whenever I want to halfway tune out an IRL conversation, whenever I just DON'T WANT TO DO ANYTHING ELSE, I reflexively open and scroll twitter.
And in lieu of that, whenever I go on hiatus my ereader app tends to become my new fidget object, and I just, READ, CONSTANTLY. Thank you so much to Ewa and to K8's friend in particular for the Harry Potter fic recs; I read through nine or ten of them, and none of those fics was under ~40k words. The longest was over 150k words. Maybe I'll write another post about how much I enjoyed those later, because it really was wonderful to read.
And I got back to reading published books! I feel like as overloaded as I feel, between the crushing weight of our modern political dystopia and the constant stimulation I give myself via social media, I just don't ordinarily have the ability to read anything "hard." Fanfic feels inherently softer to me to consume, because the amount of new information I'm taking in is cut by the characters (and often setting) already being familiar to me. New material has a high start-up cost for me, but toward the end of my two weeks fanfic was feeling TOO fluffy, and I resumed reading The Dark Forest, which is the sequel to The Three Body Problem. I am really, really enjoying it.
I also played a lot of tenirabi during my hiatus, which isn't really a thing to be proud of but honestly, what I missed the most with being off social media was being able to spam someplace with all my mobage updates. Thank you so, so much to Yrin and Samy for keeping me company via text, so we could scream about broken combos and gacha cruelty and all your usual mobage suffering.
I've also just been keeping busy in general! My new calendar app is So Satisfying because literally all I wanted was to be able to see color blocks of activity across an entire month at once, to easily pick out free days with my eyes and to parse "busy-ness" quickly on a macro level. I get antsy with idleness so it's really helpful to me to be able to fill in my time as much as possible, and leave free time only where I need it.
I saw Laurent the Saturday before Christmas, spent Christmas eve at my Aunt's with lots of family eating delicious food, went to see Coco on Christmas day with mom and sis before getting Japanese food for dinner, and invited Psiten to my friends Katie and Michael's new year's eve party (I hope Psiten had fun, even if it was a really quiet one this year!).
And my January is booked alarmingly solid, I'm STILL trying to schedule time to get dinner for my birthday with my dad, because my availabilities are "late-ish on one of ONLY THESE TWO SATURDAYS or not at all until mid February!!" but like... I'm satisfied with this.
Honestly, part of why I'm so attached to twitter is because I have this intense phobia of losing memories, and twitter allows you to instantly capture a memory in a 140-character (or 280-character) snippet. But it's not even a GOOD way of preserving the information you put into it, if you want to ever see it again. So I'd really love to find other ways to liveblog TV shows or post about my mobage or talk about fandom, where my thoughts are actually searchable in a coherent fashion and maybe even on a website that isn't full of nazis!
I really do want to talk to friends more but I will be trying to limit the time I spend on twitter, and I will be avoiding looking at my timeline itself, sticking primarily to mentions and DMs. I'm so grateful to the friends who have texted me and emailed me while I've been gone. I want to preserve the SOCIAL aspect of social media, without the always-on, information-overload that ruins my life, lol.
The entire time I've been off twitter, I've thought periodically about how exciting and nice it will be to share XYZ thing that I've done with my friends on social media, but now that I've broken my hiatus, I just... Don't want to do that.
I took a hiatus because I believed that the amount of time I was spending on twitter was detrimental to my mental health. I didn't think it was good for me to be exposed to such a constant onslaught of negative political news, fandom drama, and information that was just generally unpleasant to me. And more than that, I feel that twitter use has reframed the way my brain conceives of and processes information. I think in 140-character bursts and my attention span has been slivered down to nothing. I wanted a break from twitter to let my mind rest, and return to a more natural, comfortable baseline state.
So rather than break my friend update into 280-character chunks on twitter, I thought I would write a blog post.
The main thing I want to talk about is how I've been trying to use as much of my hiatus as possible to organize my life so I feel more productive and efficient, and can spend my free time with less worry that I'm forgetting something important and therefore enjoy myself more.
I downloaded a few new life-management type apps, specifically a journaling app, a habit tracker (not habitica, the gamefying aspect is actually horribly counter-productive for me and just stresses me out), and a calendar. It's funny, there are quite a few apps that keep your calendar, checklists, habits, goals, and even let you write journal entries, but all of those are too complex and overwrought for me. I wanted the simplest possible interfaces with only the tools I need, and so... Multiple apps it is.
When I was younger -- like really young, like starting when I was eight years old -- I journaled rigorously, obsessively, in paper notebooks. When I was about thirteen I found ujournal and livejournal, and switched to online. But between livejournal going to shit and all my friends migrating to different alternative sites and beginning to use twitter way more, I fell out of the habit of journaling online about five years ago now.
It's been good to get back into the habit, and it makes me think I could make DW updates a regular part of my life, if that was something friends will be interested in. Maybe weekly, rather than daily? I'd like the incredibly specific personal updates to stay private, lol.
But yeah, just, writing things down, making lists, keeping myself on task so important literal housekeeping gets done and my living space isn't disgusting, has been so good. I've tried to be kind and give myself a break when I don't get EVERYTHING done I had planned for a specific day, so long as I know I genuinely tried and I move it to the next day rather than giving up.
I have also read so, so much during my hiatus.
The thing with twitter is, I use it like a fidget object. Whenever I have a few minutes of free time, whenever I want to halfway tune out an IRL conversation, whenever I just DON'T WANT TO DO ANYTHING ELSE, I reflexively open and scroll twitter.
And in lieu of that, whenever I go on hiatus my ereader app tends to become my new fidget object, and I just, READ, CONSTANTLY. Thank you so much to Ewa and to K8's friend in particular for the Harry Potter fic recs; I read through nine or ten of them, and none of those fics was under ~40k words. The longest was over 150k words. Maybe I'll write another post about how much I enjoyed those later, because it really was wonderful to read.
And I got back to reading published books! I feel like as overloaded as I feel, between the crushing weight of our modern political dystopia and the constant stimulation I give myself via social media, I just don't ordinarily have the ability to read anything "hard." Fanfic feels inherently softer to me to consume, because the amount of new information I'm taking in is cut by the characters (and often setting) already being familiar to me. New material has a high start-up cost for me, but toward the end of my two weeks fanfic was feeling TOO fluffy, and I resumed reading The Dark Forest, which is the sequel to The Three Body Problem. I am really, really enjoying it.
I also played a lot of tenirabi during my hiatus, which isn't really a thing to be proud of but honestly, what I missed the most with being off social media was being able to spam someplace with all my mobage updates. Thank you so, so much to Yrin and Samy for keeping me company via text, so we could scream about broken combos and gacha cruelty and all your usual mobage suffering.
I've also just been keeping busy in general! My new calendar app is So Satisfying because literally all I wanted was to be able to see color blocks of activity across an entire month at once, to easily pick out free days with my eyes and to parse "busy-ness" quickly on a macro level. I get antsy with idleness so it's really helpful to me to be able to fill in my time as much as possible, and leave free time only where I need it.
I saw Laurent the Saturday before Christmas, spent Christmas eve at my Aunt's with lots of family eating delicious food, went to see Coco on Christmas day with mom and sis before getting Japanese food for dinner, and invited Psiten to my friends Katie and Michael's new year's eve party (I hope Psiten had fun, even if it was a really quiet one this year!).
And my January is booked alarmingly solid, I'm STILL trying to schedule time to get dinner for my birthday with my dad, because my availabilities are "late-ish on one of ONLY THESE TWO SATURDAYS or not at all until mid February!!" but like... I'm satisfied with this.
Honestly, part of why I'm so attached to twitter is because I have this intense phobia of losing memories, and twitter allows you to instantly capture a memory in a 140-character (or 280-character) snippet. But it's not even a GOOD way of preserving the information you put into it, if you want to ever see it again. So I'd really love to find other ways to liveblog TV shows or post about my mobage or talk about fandom, where my thoughts are actually searchable in a coherent fashion and maybe even on a website that isn't full of nazis!
I really do want to talk to friends more but I will be trying to limit the time I spend on twitter, and I will be avoiding looking at my timeline itself, sticking primarily to mentions and DMs. I'm so grateful to the friends who have texted me and emailed me while I've been gone. I want to preserve the SOCIAL aspect of social media, without the always-on, information-overload that ruins my life, lol.