All Eyes on Me

A few months of social media dieting

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 21:36:33 GMT

In the past several months I made a change to how I use social media. I put limits in place to block certain platforms that were actively chipping at my mental health, and to ensure I couldn't spend more than two hours a day on social media in general. I'd been increasingly developing the habit of compulsive scrolling and refreshing, and I really hated how much time I was wasting on dumb shit I didn't care about. I put in the blockers and gave the password to Bernie so I couldn't get around them. I've had abortive attempts at this in the past, so this seemed necessary to actually make it happen.

It was a rough transition. I've been having some mental health issues off and on since March of this year. I feel embarrassed saying this, seeing as in the last year so much of my life has been not only good, but a serious improvement over how things had been previously-- I got a new job that was a huge step up in my career, I moved into a new house, Bernie and I get to live together now. I don't mean to be ungrateful or unappreciative of all those great things. But I keep falling into intermittent low moods, and anxiety spikes hit me out of nowhere and sometimes keep my awake at night. A rough period was the precipitating event for the social media diet, since it seemed to be aggravating the condition.

For a few weeks after, my brain seemed to go into intense dopamine withdrawal, unable to focus on or get interested in anything. I felt like a lump and do anything was a struggle. It was especially rough in stressed out moments where I could feel the addictive behaviors coming out. But eventually I evened out. I no longer feel so under-stimulated, and some days I don't even hit the two hour limit. I'm certainly relieved at that.

But I was hoping I'd feel better in the day to day. I've been long concerned that social media aggravates the depression, and I was kind of hoping that cutting back might improve my general sense of wellbeing. I don't really think I've experienced that. I was also hoping it might help with my engagement issues, my trouble to get interested enough in anything to pay attention to it. But no luck there either, at least not that I've noted.

It's pretty disappointing. This has always been my problem-- I've always been good about changing my behavior to make things better. But altering how I FEEL, finding any way to change my emotions, I never seem to be able to manage.

Still, there are tangible benefits. I definitely waste less time, which always led to a huge sense of self-disgust, so I'm glad to be experiencing less of that. I've been reading more and more books, and having a much easier time doing so. I had years where I was barely reading any long-form anything, a huge source of consternation and shame, and I've vastly outstripped my reading goal for the year already. It may be a sign that it's improving my ability to focus. That I will definitely take.

Maybe it needs more time. Patience is not my strong suit. But, as a show I'm fond of says, it gets eaiser. But you have to do it every day.

That's the hard part.

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ALL YOUR LIBRARY CARDS ARE BELONG TO ME

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 21:13:09 GMT

I am deeply enjoying the Libby app. Liz Salazar pointed out to me that you can use your Boston Public Library card to get access to reciprocal library networks, which I have now done for as many places as would let me. That combined with requesting a card for my dad’s address, I now have NINE LIBRARIES I CAN BORROW BOOKS FROM. I am ridiculously delighted.

I still can’t get over what a well-designed app Libby is. It’s easy to use and the interface is really attractive and intuitive. If you’re not on it, I highly recommend it, and in doing the trick to maximize your library access. The fact that I can put myself on the waitlist for a book I want from multiple institutions is wonderful. I’ve already been able to get MANY books I couldn’t find in the libraries I originally had cards for. Lately I’ve been trying to have a written book and an audiobook going at all times, one so I can physically read and one to listen to as I go about my day, and all these cards in Libby have been great for that. I’ve blazed through the first three Rivers of London books, an urban fantasy series that Matt Kamm recommended to me years ago and it finally struck me to dug into. They’ve been my audiobooks because the narrator, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, is so excellent, capturing the characters while doing all the regional accents.

I’ve run into a bit of a snag, since the fourth book in the series has a waitlist at all the institutions that have it. It’s also not on Hoopla, which is disappointing. And apparently only ONE of my nine libraries has Ruth Goodman’s How to Be a Victorian, which got taken away at the end of the borrowing period before I had finished it. But it only makes me want to have MORE LIBRARY CARDS, until I can have all the books I wanted!

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As read by my computer wife Karen

Tue, 30 Apr 2019 19:07:21 GMT

Artist's rendering of this process

So yesterday was the day I was finally allowed to return to my completed first draft of my Adonis novel, after taking a two-week break from it in hopes of gaining some measure of objectivity. And, perhaps predictably giving what a disaster human I am, I found myself terrified to look at it, after spending a week chewing my face off wanting to get back to work.

But I marshaled my forces and set myself to read it— just read it, before I attempted any changes. It was a struggle to get going, if only because every time I ran into something I wasn't happy with— which, even within the first chapter or two, happened constantly —I wanted to get up and pace around to work off the nervous energy. This is a frequent discomfort reaction on my part, one that is not very conducive to efficient reading.

Then, by pure accident, I turned on the Read Aloud function of Microsoft Word— the robotic vocabulator or whatever that converts text to speech. I think I vaguely knew this existed, but it never occurred to me to use before, until it started reading at a random place in the second chapter of my book.

For whatever reason, I immediately thought of Karen, artificially intelligent domestic companion to the Spongebob villain Plankton, hilariously referred to as his "computer wife." I was never a huge Spongebob fan, but I always loved that joke, because to my recollection they provided no explanation for Karen's existence, and I enjoyed the lowkey implication that no actual living person could stand being married to Plankton. Also, come on— the phrase "computer wife"? COMEDY GOLD.

This tickled me enough to get me over some of my anxiety. If "Karen" read it to me, I wouldn't have to sit still and focus. I could flail and roll around and pace as much as I wanted without losing my place. "Okay, computer wife," I said, putting my headphones in. "Let's do this." So I took a long walk around my neighborhood, under an umbrella to ward off the rain, with no distractions from the words of my book.

Friends, "Karen" is not a good reader. She murders rhythm. She pauses for about five minutes every time she hits a comma. She has baffling blindspots when it comes to pronunciations of certain relatively mundane words, such as "lunging" and "bruise." I am infuriated by her inability to recognize the word "legion" when she has no trouble with "legionnaire." But she reads clearly and accurately, exactly as it occurs on the page. And her flat, matter-of-fact, reducto-ad-absurdium diction makes me focus on the words, with none of the distraction that good actors often bring when their skill elevates bad material.

And I found I could separate a little bit of my emotional closeness to the text when I could "blame" her, however ridiculously, for the parts when it sounded bad. "You're KILLING ME, Karen!" I moaned, every time she came to a part where I never settled for saying something one way when I could say it three or four. Or "WHAT IS THIS SHIT, KAREN?" when she plowed her way through mangled, awkward phrasing. I kind of feel like I was more able to objectively evaluate what sections were working and what weren't, because I felt weirdly less responsible for the failures when she was presenting the words to me. Crazy, but I'll take it!

It's... not a perfect system. Hearing the sex scenes like that is an endurance exercise; my computer wife has no facility for dirty talk. I feel like even awesome ones weren't going to outshine delivery that stilted. And there's no way to gauge the rhythm or flow of the verbiage, as she basically can convey none. But I found that if I was able to enjoy and feel engaged by a scene even through her droning monotone, I must have done a pretty good job with it. And if my prose wasn't working, well, Karen sure as hell wasn't going to dress it up.

I have listened to it twice through in this manner, to make sure my impressions weren't a fluke. I feel pretty confident in my overall assessment that the piece is at once both much better and much worse than I feared, depending on the spot. I note that when it comes to "action" scenes, as in, scene where things are happening, such as characters taking actions or pursuing their goals with tactics, the book is much, much stronger. That totally makes sense, given my background as a dramatist and my overall storytelling philosophy to think of narrative as a series of actions that people take according to their goals, their character, and their circumstances. When it comes to moments of "internality," where a character is examining a state of affairs internally, or when I need to describe something that's not a HAPPENING, it gets much, much weaker. I wasn't kidding when I mentioned not settling for saying something one way when I could hammer it home a few more different ways on top of that.

And the over-explaining. I mean, I seriously have the sentence "What seemed a mere inevitability became a sword of Damocles for which he could never stop waiting to fall."

...

Really, Roberts? You need to clarify "for which he could never stop waiting to fall"? THAT'S WHAT SWORDS OF DAMOCLES ARE, GENIUS. THAT IS LITERALLY ALL THEY MEAN. THAT IS THE ENTIRE IDIOM. You might as well have written "became a sword of Damocles that acted like a sword of Damocles."

Ugh. Who wrote this shit? KAREN I BLAME YOU.

Anyway. I feel like this is a decent starting point. It is going to take a lot, a lot, A LOT of work to whip those lousy, overwritten sections into shape. But I was worried I was not going to be able to make any like an accurate, objective assessment of my work, and I really think this helped with that.

Thanks for the help, computer wife! Now learn how to fucking pronounce "protege."

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On a social media diet

Tue, 05 Mar 2019 22:06:09 GMT

I've made an effort recently to seriously cut back on my social media use. I can't abandon it entirely— it's the only really effective way I have to promote my creative work —but I think excessive exposure to it is adversely affecting my mental health. My depression has a tendency to make me lapse into it as an endless source of bullshit input when my brain can't seem to latch onto anything substantive. And I get no joy from scrolling dumb meaningless shit on Facebook or Twitter, yet I do it when I feel bad anyway, and end up feeling worse with the time I waste. So I'm allowing myself to post things, check notifications once a day, but no scrolling through random feed stuff. I lose a ton of time to it and end up feeling bad.

I'm also trying to change my relationship with my smart phone, and I think the social media stuff is part of the problem. I've been reading articles and talking to people about smart phone addiction, how it destroys focus, and depresses enjoyment and engagement in other things. And as bad as one author had it, I compared my usage data to his and mine was actually worse. That was depressing to see. I've been struggling with attention issues and an inability to get engaged with things I would normally expect to enjoy, and I think this addiction at least makes it worse, even if it's not totally responsible. Recently I had some of the worst inability to enjoy or get interested in something that should have made me happy in ages, and it was such a terrible feeling I've resolved to do something about it. I don't know if just cutting way, way back on social media is enough to undo any damage, but I figure it's a place to start. If nothing else, I hate how hard it is for me to read books, or anything longform anymore, because I can't rouse the interest or focus. Even an improvement on that front would be a little victory.

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So much for that blood test

Wed, 06 Feb 2019 20:12:34 GMT

Well, got the results of my blood test back. The verdict: NOTHING. All my levels are fine; spectacular, even. I am the specimen of health. I mean, I do eat well, sleep well, and work out almost every day. This is ultimately a good thing, as I should be grateful I'm in physically good shape with no real problems. But I'm a touch disappointed there wasn't something identifiable or treatable found, like an iron deficiency or something. Because then I might have something I can blame for my feelings of low energy and lack of focus, and a clearer course of action to take to possibly fixing it. As it is, I don't know what I can do to change things, and I've been so frustrated by the impact it's had on my daily life.

To be honest, I am already starting to do a little better taking care of life stuff. I've made a ton of progress cleaning up my house, culling my possessions and organizing what I keep. It hasn't been very long, but I've already done better with my journal, and making sure I do at least a little work on a writing project every day. I've been on top of work responsibilities, such that so far nothing has been forgotten, or slipped to the last minute. I'm hoping to make these things habit again. I even resolved to try to get back into reading novels, even if it means reading only one chapter a night before bed.

But I still FEEL off. I sleep a lot, often going to bed ridiculously early and still napping during the day. And focus is a fucking BATTLE. I can usually eventually get into whatever I need to work on, but it takes a fair bit of struggle to get started, which wastes a lot of time. Reading just that one chapter of a book, I feel my brain wanting to drift almost constantly. I've had a suspicion for years smart phone addiction is partially to blame. It's worth it to try and modify how I interact with it, though I haven't yet decided how, and I know it's going to be hard. I really am addicted. I've been making a fair number of changes lately which have required effort and resolve, so I don't want to overload myself too fast. Still, it's looking like forcing myself to make adjustments to how I live are the only hope I have of snapping myself out of this bad rut. I'll just have to phase more things in gradually, I suppose.

But I really hoped I could just have started taking iron supplements or something and had an easy fix.

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