I Feel Worse, I Feel Better

Watching TV is both a treat and a segue. My goal has been to remove myself from short form content - where I lost hours and never felt settled - to longer form content. 

It is working, I am progressing, I am successful. 

So far, I am slashing the time spent on my short form platforms and it feels much better. It feels great, I feel far more settled, it is so good that I often forget how it was before. I said that it is a mistake to move too fast. How I feel now, is that I don't like watching this much TV. In the past, I've restricted myself here and by accident found my way back to short form content. I am trying to be careful here. I long for TV. I hate it in several ways but I long all the same. 

I feel glued to my TV. I put a restriction on my phone that only an hour of watching is permitted at a time and I have only 5 sessions available daily, and this works so well for most of my apps, but I'm noticing that I don't want to waste the time I have, so I am far more focused on TV than ever before. 

When I come off of watching TV, I itch to watch more, but the reason I stopped was probably because I didn't feel well or had a headache coming on or felt fed up and helpless and mindless and bored and I wanted to do something instead of feel trapped in my body, time wasting. 

The hardest part seems to be that first half an hour, I feel not quite bored and not quite hopeless, it's hard to describe when I'm not in it. I am writing this after that first half an hour period and I know that I am better, I can feel my brain healing and I feel ready to watch again, but I think I will reset the progress my brain has had. It's like I'm eating healthy and I feel the benefits, but I can't see them and I don't know if it is worth it yet. I think it is, but I also don't care and I do, but then I think "just one more episode please". Why go without now, when it might not matter this much? It's like the idea that security should feel like a waste of money because good security feels like nothing will go wrong because they ward off attack and defend you, so you feel like they make no difference. Like a swan swimming, graceful on top, mad underwater and you feel it when they're gone.

The danger now is that if I ward off TV, try to go cold turkey, I might (I will) turn to too much short form content. I said before, that until short form content is not a fight then I mustn't make this harder for myself. I think that my fight with not falling to short form content is not over yet, I am doing better, but I still watch (not for hours anymore which is such a blessing, but still).

I think if I find myself turning to short form content, I WILL redirect to TV. I won't worry about multitasking, I'll just watch TV so I don't watch short form content. Short form content is the evil-er enemy here, right now. 

I have questions for myself now: What do I want? What is my goal here?

Do I want to be a no phone girli that has a pre-phone era life, with books and crafts and no online habits? Yes. I think ultimately that sounds great. I think that sounds better. I want to be offline, I want to be off phone, I want to drop my screen time to 2 hours, but lets aim for 3 to start. [I remember when this wasn't the goal, when being without my phone felt silly and unbearable, but I'm fed up now, and I see that staring for hours in the same place doesn't actually add to my life and benefit me in the way I first thought it did]. I'm on track, I'm getting better. I was good before, but that's when I actively worked on it and I let that slip. TV drags that number up. I wonder if watching on not-my-phone would feel different. I quite like the idea of having a space for everything and a routine. That sounds cozy. That's something I will look into.

How do I get there? It's all well and good saying it, but I need to make it actionable. Right now, the longer I spend off my phone, off TV, off apps, the better I'm feeling. I feel rejuvenated and healthier and it's all coming back to me, in these minutes since. I felt bad physically before and it felt like I would feel that for a long time, and if felt so hard to stay off my phone but, the longer I spend away the better I feel now. [This way of thinking felt so far from truth an hour ago, I really want to remember this and the overarching goal, because each time I watch something on my phone, I reset my progress and risk forgetting this]. Can I keep this up? Just never turn back, keep it turned off? Can I survive the boredom of literally everything else until I forget any better and fall in love with the analogue way that nourishes my soul?

Boredom is, after all, only for a few moments, then my brain carries me away into all the thoughts I have and stories in my head. The long term pay off of everything else means the initial boredom is brief and really worth it. 

It drains and it sucks that phones are weaved into so many facets of life today. The canteen near me needs an app on my phone. I have to charge my phone for dinner, no leaving it behind - no, I get to bring that temptation with me. Same for paying, same for school, same for tutor, same for laundry, same for parking, same for, same for, same for. Why does everything need an app? I swear this shit should be optional.