Heeeey👋💕💖 Haven't heard from you a while and just wanted to check if everything's going well?💕 I know u you've said you had lots to do, so I'm hoping everything's going well💕💖😭✊️
Hi Tumblr friend 👋 and other Tumblr friends I haven't talked to lately. Thanks for checking in!! 🫂 I've been very busy. As some of my Tumblr acquaintances may know, I've been in the process of searching for a job that suits me, and it's been... well, I live in the smack-dab middle of the USA in a city full of red-leaning voters, so you can imagine how that goes. Especially for a sensitive lil autistic lass like myself. (I could go on at length about the various bullshits of job hunting here and now, but I'll leave it at that.)
Futhermore, I've been really focusing on decreasing my screen time. Reducing hours and hours of my everyday experience to a small, flat box that made me anxious was destroying my health and wellbeing. Also, I find I can no longer trust in the internet to be a genuine representation of the thoughts and creations of my fellow humans - it seems to me that there's an overwhelming amount of company-created AI or disingenuous slop, which comes from angles of advertising, persuasion, and even propaganda. It's getting harder and harder to tell what's "real" and what's AI, or lies, or whatever else. So I'm choosing to disengage from the digital world as much as is feasible. I understand that this is where a lot of current human communication happens, and there is still value in that. But in a time when the machines I use can and do decide for me what I will see, what I will learn, how I will view the world - and what information is hidden from me - I choose to step away from the machines.
I've been making a concentrated effort to download the media I care about onto my own storage devices, cancel subscriptions, physically alter my routines and environment to encourage the use of physical items and vintage tech rather than relying on my phone and computer for every single task and moment. I bought a shitty little digital camera for $15 at Five Below and I've been carrying that around to take pictures of things I like instead of my phone. Is the quality the same? No, but I find that the vintage look actually adds to my enjoyment of the resulting photos. I got pocket-sized little mini composition books at the dollar store and I've been carrying one and a pen in my pocket or bag at all times so that I don't have to rely on my phone to jot down notes. I got a paper planner that I'm not good at keeping up with yet, but I'm practicing. I dug out an old radio alarm clock to use instead of my phone for waking up in the morning. I made my phone a little bed - yes, really - and I put it "to bed" in its little box at 10pm, and I don't get it out until after breakfast, to physically prevent myself from being on my phone at night. I've been going to the library to print out screenshots of my absolute favorite Pinterest Boards so that I have the information and inspiration I saved there, without having to get onto Pinterest to see it. I downloaded my important Google Docs to a flash drive so I can delete them off of the CLoud. Etc. Etc. (Did you know Google uses everything you save in Google Docs to train its AI, without telling you and without permission? Yeah. Might wanna get your writing off of there.)
Small steps, but it adds up. I'm grounding myself in the physical world by creating environmental alternatives to phone / computer use, and/or creating environmental blocks to using them at all. And honestly, after just like a few months of working on this bit by bit, I feel TREMENDOUSLY better. I cannot overstate how much less frazzled and depressed I feel on a daily basis when I'm engaging with the actual real physical tactile world for most hours of the day, instead of just looking at the same spot and imagining the world. (Usually, imagining a negative and scary world, due to News. Not to say we shouldn't be informed - just, like, not ALL DAY.)
I very much recommend this YouTube video about some of the effects of being indoors (and on screens all the time) on your mind and body. I also suggest doing your own research. Turns out, sitting still and staring at a screen for as long as we do, as often as we do, affects basically every single part of our existence. Like, did you know that keeping your eyes fixed on one spot for a long time tells your brain and body that you're being hunted? It puts you into stress mode because it's like you're watching a predator. So many things about phones and screens are fucking us up in so many weird, sneaky ways that we didn't consider when we made this tech. Anyway.
Also, I've been doing a fuckton of inner work and engaging with inner child shit and working on my relationship with my body and the way I react to others due to my complexes, etc. Working on reparenting myself. I want kids in a few years and if I'm gonna be a better parent, I gotta first parent myself better. So we're spending some time practicing talking to ourselves nicely and verbally guiding ourselves through hard feelings and tucking ourselves into bed on time, etc.
But here's the part people probably actually care about: no, I haven't abandoned my fanfics forever. I'm not in a season of creative production right now. I think I kinda burned myself out on that last year, unfortunately. I'm in a rest, recovery, and healing stage. But that won't last forever, and I do want to finish the stories I began in the Squid Game fandom. Because I'm a bad liar, I'll just tell you straight up that I do not know when that may be.
Now I'm gonna go back to downloading some of my favorite Youtube videos onto my thumb drive so I don't have to get advertised to in order to watch Shane and Ryan Ghost hunt. Toodles.