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Forms of Light

Social Media Detox Day 2

"Do you read?" my new coworkers asked me.

My mind was instantly inundated with the envious desire I hold to be a book person the way I was before smartphones.

I read--don't get me wrong--but I think the sentiment is all wrong.

I used to tear through books, and read the same ones over and over. I did have merit-based motivation to read new ones, but mainly so I could get a high enough Accelerated Reader score for my teacher to take me to Sonic. Outside of that, I did it for the love of it, and to experience a new world at my fingertips.

All of that joy was lost with the instant gratification I can get from scrolling. But being immersed in high-stakes academia for so long, I know how to read to retain information I want store.

Thus, when I do read, I treat it like an assignment. I read nonfiction or self-help about topics I'm interested in. I take notes. I mentally check for retention. I re-read the parts I've forgotten, until it's concrete in my mind. And I do it because I tell myself I will be a smarter, more interesting, well-rounded person with this information.

When I see people read fiction for the love of it, I wish I were them. Some people reduce the accomplishment of fiction readers, but if you ask me, those are the true readers. They're not trying to impress anyone.

It's been so long since I've read with pure intentions that the concept is foreign to me. I read a synopsis of a fiction book with an intriguing cover that says, 'Maya is 750 year old vampire living on a commune of--,' and my brain goes, 'Why do we need to know this? What part do I take notes on?'

I bought two fiction books to read this year in hopes of rekindling my desire, and so far, they sit on Shawn's bed, used to flatten a map.

But I thought that maybe, others who have gone through nursing school could relate to the deconditioning of reading for retention vs novelty.

"Non-fiction, mostly," I said, briefly detailing my struggle.

They stared at me blankly.

"I wish I could do that,"

"What do you read?" I asked.

"Mostly fairy porn,"

Social Media Detox Day -1

I heard someone say on TikTok that it's hard to transition back into your daily life from a nursing job, because you still feel like everything is life-or-death.

Already an anxious, impatient person to start, I fear there was never any hope for me. Outside of work, no one has any sense of urgency and I hate them for it. Not even me, whose foggy brain awakes from a double-digit slumber and entirely releases the reigns on my focus it held with white knuckles all weekend long. Where did the horses go? I don't have the energy to know or to care.

As a weekend alt ICU nurse, I keep trying to convince myself that this gig would be sweet as fuck if I could just make the transition back to normal. Two days of intensity in exchange for five days off. I imagine all the things I could do with five days off: I could pursue hobbies most adults in the workforce would never have time for. I never do, though, as I'm far too busy being the most high strung person to ever live. Shawn fumbles with the keys to unlock the door and my nervous system feels like I'm watching him defuse a bomb with mittens on. I'm always on edge. The voice inside me that screams, 'This is an emergency! HURRY!' never leaves.

I've never been sick or injured more. If I don't have a chest cold that's suffocating me with mucus, I'm waking up feeling like every one of my muscles was made for a much shorter person, constantly pulling on my joints in an attempt to render me horizontal.

The worst part about this is that I can't do it in private and I have to do it in front of the best partner I've ever had. I've dated so many men who were terrible. I couldn't have banged out this chapter of my life during one of those timelines?

What they don't tell you about being with someone who is the best partner you could ever imagine is that, when you're not doing well, it's also a daily humiliation ritual.

I'm always rushing him for no reason. I stay in bed forever. I'm littering the house with clutter. I'm no longer the super fit person he started dating. And he doesn't mind? We're not going to fight about that? He just loves and accepts me as the pathetic, hobbling, crotchety human thunderstorm I am right now?

Disgusting. I'd rather be fighting.

I think, though, that burnout is a diagnosis of exclusion. At least that's what I tell myself when the source of potential burnout is also paying my bills.

There are other things I could fix in the meantime. My addiction to screen time. My lack of mobility. The astronomical amount of pressure I put on myself that makes the most simple tasks sound too daunting to begin.

So, I begin 2026 on a journey to tackle all of those things first.

expressions-of-nature

by Jacob Argyle

I watch Shawn play guitar in his bedroom the night before the judgment is ruled.

His fingers carefully tend to the strings, converting nervous energy into a soft melody that fills the home with a cozy ambiance.

This is, of course, intentional. Never believe him when he says he's just wingin' it. Everything that looks effortless to him is the result of years of masterfully-curated mantras and intentional mindset shifts. Behind every action, there's always a therapist and philosopher working in the background.

No wonder he doesn't sleep.

I silently recall a poem of his I once read about avoiding consumption by sadness and grief by using that energy to create and nurture. "Catharsis is the keywork/balance is the reward,"

In typical Shawn poetry fashion, this is a multi-faceted Easter egg of a line. No matter what your understanding of "keywork" is, your interpretation would be correct. But when you understand all of the definitions, you realize that they're all correct, they're all intentional, and they all layer.

In woodwind instruments, keywork is what you do with your fingers to sustain the melody. Without keywork, there would just be blasts of air. Just like without practice and intention to use it productively, blasts of emotional energy can be unpleasant or destructive.

In social work, a keyworker manages one's support and care. In this sense, choosing to take ownership of what you're feeling and using it to create areas of growth or give back to Earth and community is essentially acting as your own keyworker.

And finally, in the fictional universe created by Coheed and Cambria, "The Keywork" is an energy system that powers the planets of their world. This was absolutely a reference to this term, as he has a Coheed tattoo of the symbol that represents this concept.

Thus, in training yourself to harness your pain and anguish to nurture and create, you are carefully crafting the melody of your actions; providing yourself with support, care, and balance that is internally motivated; and giving life force to your world.

He's said that he thinks my interpretations are deeper than anything he could have intentionally created, but there's no way that's true. There's a hidden treasure like this in almost every poem, where you could read the line literally or metaphorically and both work interchangeably. You just have to know what word to look for.

It may be modesty, but I also think there's just a level of highly analytical latent processes built into his operating system. During cross-examination, he appeared to carefully anticipate the direction and future case-building implications of each question. He navigated the lawyer's attempts to catch him in a contradiction or twist his words like a chess player, knowing where his opponent was going from the first move. When he seemed oblivious to this after the fact, our lawyer suggested, 'Maybe you just have good intuition,' But I suspect it's more than that.

Watching him so naturally convert the dread and anticipation that has been ten months in the making into song strengthens the admiration and love for him more than I assumed I was capable of. I'm always in awe of the way my love for him has no ceiling.

His gaze follows the slope of his nose in concentration. You could never convince me his nose isn't perfect for his face. Though it's not tiny and delicate, it suits his long, slender face, making him look wise and contemplative. The perfectly crafted plane of his nose bridge points to whatever he's currently focusing on.

Summer has kissed his silky hair with little golden halos that catch in the light, and his skin is slightly toastier than his Winter hue.

I've never seen anyone more beautiful in my entire life. But in a similarly layered construct, I think it's because he physically looks like who he is: regal and wise, strong and masculine with just the perfect sprinkles of feminine energy. I love how he looks because he's physically beautiful, and I also love how he looks because he looks like his soul.

When I was in my PMDD luteal phase with past partners, I would ruminate on the way our relationship wasn't working or on ways I felt rejected and lash out and start fights.

When I'm in my PMDD luteal phase with Shawn, I just get emotional because I have so much love to give him, but never enough time to fulfill it.

I'm walking around absolutely brimming with so much love and adoration that it's physically uncomfortable to go such prolonged periods without transferring it to him.

In the weirdest and least romantic description, it's the closest to the sensation of a full bladder, but in my chest.

It hurts to not be able to give love to him.

I want to lay with him for hours and pour physical affection into him: run my fingers through his hair, rub his chest, kiss him all over.

There are times when I know I need to roll over to my side of the bed to fall asleep, and it's heartbreaking to turn away from him.

It's just like....I've gone my entire life unquestionably knowing I was loved, but very rarely seen for who I truly am. I've felt in almost every relationship that I've had to fight to be understood.

The way he understands me and sees me so intuitively is overwhelmingly comforting at times. It feels like I'm finally fully emotionally safe for the first time in my life; finally not alone. I consider myself to be a fairly introspective person, and yet he's always a step ahead in recognizing and deciphering my emotions. When I say I miss him and start to get emotional, he knows when to cracks jokes and acts silly because I don't want to cry and when to be sincere and tell me he and his love will always be there waiting for me.

But imagining him consoling me when I'm having anxiety is just too comforting. It makes me cry every time, without fail. He's just too sweet...too loving. The juxtaposition of his safety against the world is too overwhelming.

"Come here, darlin'," my mental fabrication of him tells me, as he wraps me up in his warm embrace that smells like a mix of Aussie shampoo, patchouli, and palo santo.

"Mmmm," he lets out a content sigh as I squeeze him, trying to absorb every ounce of him while I can. He is the epitome of healthy balance in that he is both extraordinarily passionate and extraordinarily even-keeled. He's not nonchalant, but he loves so gracefully, like he's been training for it his whole life. I don't have the keenest understanding of astrology, but I think it's exactly what you'd expect from someone with a Taurus moon and Scorpio venus. Like, I'm obsessed with you but I'm so at peace with it and I also have plants to tend to.

When I love passionately, it's a disgusting process. It's messy. It slowly washes over me despite kicking and screaming, like an overstimulated toddler reluctantly succumbing to a nap. I fight it. I'm not accustomed to so many feelings and it overwhelms my senses. It feels dangerous. I'm not sure I feel comfortable having one person mean so much to me. What if I lose them? What if I'm not good enough? What if they hurt me? What if having someone see into my soul and lend me so much comfort makes me soft and unmotivated? What if it dulls my rage? How will I get anything done?

Shawn is just so comfortable with passionate love. It's never needy, it's never overwhelming, and it's never too much. But he's also seemingly undeterred by the turbulence of my love. He sees me struggle with all of it and just says, 'That's okay. You can feel your feelings. I still love you just the same. And in fact, I love you more,'

And somehow, I believe him.

Trisha met her Moses at 32 and so did I.

He wasn't always securely attached. And I've never seen him distressed in the face of love, only in the face of abandonment. But maybe it's the fact that my love is so palpable that it puts him at ease. Even if it's disgusting and messy.

vintagelasvegas

Backstage at Folies Bergere, Tropicana. Las Vegas, 1969. Bettmann archives.

Social Media Detox Day 1

Ever since I started reading The Anxious Generation, even on days I haven't been able to adhere to my social media restrictions (see: nearly every day) I've become increasingly more cognizant of how social media makes me feel.

I think the a-few-months-ago version of me would say that it doesn't really make me feel anything. Which was a positive. I'd often idly scroll after a rough shift at work the way someone would chain smoke cigarettes in the parking lot after an adrenaline-fueled heist. The repetitive motion of my fingers and constant stimulation helped to numb my brain that would otherwise be replaying my whole shift and dissecting my performance. How long was that patient waiting for me to get in their room? Maybe I should've charted that clinician interaction. Are my coworkers wondering why my time management isn't better this far along?

But as far back as 5-10 years ago, I had a sneaking suspicion that my brain capacity and attention span wasn't what it used to be. What happened to the brain that would read a 500-page novel in one afternoon because I was bored? What happened to the brain that didn't feel like trying something new was an insurmountable task? The brain that could suspend its disinterest or boredom for more than four seconds?

I think I really started to notice this effect when TikTok surfaced. Though my attention span had been slowly dwindling for quite some time, my bar for adequate mental stimulation ramped up so swiftly during 2020 that nothing that didn't draw me in instantaneously was worth my time. I would stay up all night in an endless scroll loop, almost hoping my phone would die to sever the hold my phone had on my eyeballs.

So, starting this month, I gave myself five fifteen-minute segments per day to scroll social media. And while this hasn't always worked, and my withdrawing brain has found ways to try and circumvent these rules ("I got pulled away and started texting during my 15 minutes, so I need another 15 minutes now!"), it did make my scrolling more intentional and less mindless. And that led to me starting to realize, 'Wow. What a bunch a junk this all is,'

Ten years ago, I would wake up to 20+ Facebook notifications.

They would all be interesting too.

I often woke up and looked at my phone with the same rush of anticipation you get on Christmas morning, when you realize presents are waiting for you. There was a huge renaissance in both social media and the beauty industry at this time, and I was heavily immersed in both. I was in multiple extremely active beauty groups of locals girls who knew me and recognized me when they spotted me in public. Nearly every notification was a compliment, an extension of friendship, an interesting post, or a piece of juicy gossip that felt highly cohesive with the real world. If I was a rat in a cage, I certainly didn't notice. I felt in control. Every time I hit the button, I was getting the cheese.

Slowly, I started to notice that my notifications were getting more disappointing. I'd click expecting a connection, and instead I'd get a lackluster notification about someone's birthday or a post in a random group. As I scrolled through my newsfeed, I saw fewer of my friends' thoughts and feelings and more ads and content that didn't interest me. My posts and photos that would've gotten ample engagement a few years ago were hardly noticed. Yet, I kept getting on dozens of times a day expecting something different. This is what Jonathan Haidt describes as, 'the wearing smooth of a path in the brain vs. the decisions of a rational consciousness.' I was a rat furiously pressing a button that was dispensing cheese a fraction of the time.

In fact, I may have been pressing it more, since I wasn't getting the dopamine fix I craved.

But now that I've acknowledged it for the problem it is, with every step back I take, I'm realizing more.

1/5: I browse a Reddit snark page about a YouTuber around my age who I've casually watched for several years. She gets so much hate, but nothing she's done has ever been particularly heinous. Her content has really fallen off throughout the last few years, she's posted fewer videos of increasingly less substance and quality, she's gained some weight, and has gotten some plastic surgery that hasn't done her any favors. I feel sad for her. She's always had a lot of extreme highs and lows in mood that have seemed like well-concealed bipolar disorder to me, and I think nowadays, she's struggling with some depression and alcoholism.

People are so fucking brutal to her. Zooming in on screen grabs of her face, talking about how ugly and disgusting she's gotten.

Why am I reading this? Is this making me feel better or worse about myself?

I think about how brutal people could also be on TikTok. The obsession with finding new, ever-evolving ways to tell women how ugly, outdated, and old they look.

At 33 years old, I'm objectively the most enhanced version of myself that I've ever been: I've had a rhinoplasty and braces, my skin is generally completely clear, I have fewer wrinkles than I did in my late 20's thanks to botox, and after six years of weightlifting, I have about the same body fat percentage I did in my 20's but with ten pounds more muscle. Yet, I think I feel more hyper aware of my flaws than ever before.

I notice the minuscule ways my face has started to sag or the way my eye sockets have started to hollow. Younger Me would been stoked to have more visible abs, but I find myself obsessing over whether they just look like fat, or why my stomach isn't totally flat anymore, as if muscle doesn't obviously project outward. I find myself getting nervous as the scale creeps upward, as if this wasn't the direct result of a commitment I made to get stronger, week after week. As if this isn't an entirely reversible consequence of working hard and succeeding. As if, even if it were a bit of extra fat, that's not something I find attractive on virtually everyone else but me.

And while me yo-yo-ing the past six years between my lowest and highest weights of my life due to weightlifting between phases of chronic nausea may be the source of some mild body dysmorphia, I think a lot of the culprit may be external.

Looksmaxxing, fat potential, hip dips, mewing, American Girl Doll teeth, nasolabial folds, millennial pause. I've worked and been immersed in the beauty industry for half my life, and I've never seen such an influx of terminology with the intention of driving self-consciousness than there is now. And listen......I know it's stupid. That's the worst part. Why am I letting someone with an insane filter, whose frontal lobe isn't even developed tell me that I'm not attractive enough?

But I think that the content I consume lives in my subconscious more than I know. When I see people with normal physical variants or subtle signs of aging get picked apart for daring to have confidence, even if I disagree, I subconsciously assume that everyone is scrutinizing me in a similar fashion.

I know why too. To sell things, of course. Keep women consuming content to fuel self-hatred and self-consciousness, keep them questioning, 'Maybe I have no idea what's trending or looks good anymore,' 'Maybe this is a flaw that needs to be fixed,' 'Maybe if I spend more time studying these content creators, I can improve,' and you've got someone who needs your services.

I just can't help but think that it didn't used to be like this.

But Jonathan Haidt explains this too. While Gen Z creators might tell millennials how cringe and outdated they are, this is actually a reflection of the level of pressure and judgment they've felt since the moment their brains were hardwired for peer feedback.

Millennials narrowly escaped it. We got to live an adolescence that was relatively unencumbered by such intense and constant pressure to maintain an online image. Gen Z creators scrutinize because they only know a world of scrutiny. Their barometer for attractiveness is irreparably skewed by editing tools and algorithms that show a pool of freakishly attractive anomalies that one might only see 1-2 of in a lifetime, pre-internet. The men of their generation are so sucked in by porn that they're unable to find true satisfaction in connection and intimacy.

We may be cringe, but at least we know what it's like to be free.

And I think I want to choose to be free again.

#personal #amlao