Tonight is one of those nights when I realize there's something in me that I really don't like. I get this feeling in the pit of my gut, and I know. I know that there's no excuse. I know that I have to be a better human. It's just laziness, really. It's easy to sit back and let the entropy of my human nature render me a worse person than I was the day before. Excuses are easier than the hard work of effort, but effort is what matters. Effort is what shows people you love them. I like to hide behind introversion, it's my go-to excuse, but it's a shitty one.
I guess this is a bit of a downer for a day-before-thanksgiving post. I didn't set out to write a downer post, but then: the feels. They came and they conquered and I knew they were speaking the truth. I knew the feeling in the pit of my gut wasn't just a feeling, it was a message. A wake up call.
In a lot of ways I've been wanting to step away from the internet. Not completely because it's 2013 and come on. But the internet gives introverts like me this feeling like we're connecting with people, and sometimes we are. Sometime's we're truly making deep connections with others. But mostly, it's a lot of noise. Chatter. Endless voices saying nothing, constantly. I love the internet for so many reasons, and so many corgi photos, and so many beautifully written posts and articles and videos, and so on, but I also feel this chasm in life between self-medicating with scrolling, and going out and making physical human connections with people in my immediate community. The former is so much easier, especially, I think, for introverts like myself. We can get lost in the endless voices, tweeting, commenting, replying, soapboxing, on and on. We become part of a sea of nothing and everything.
Truthfully there are times, rather frequently, when I'd like to quit the entire internet altogether. For all the amazing friendships I've made, connections experienced, solidarity shared, inspiration, and more, I can't help but feel like it's all not enough. It's not enough to replace what is happening around me in my physical life, in my community, in my city. I want to transplant friendships, connections, solidarity and inspiration into my physical community. I want it surrounding me, not on a screen. I know that the people online are actual people, and that those connections are real, but there's something different about the face to face connections. I don't want to devalue the importance of those amazing online connections, but I've focused on the online connections to the detriment of offline connections.
It's so unnatural to step away from this online world. My life has been built around the internet for five years, but it's starting to feel detrimental. I'm pretty bad at multitasking, both on macro and micro scales, so in focusing on the blog/social media, my friendships and general IRL social life have waned. Whatever you choose to feed is what is most healthy and it turns out I've been feeding my online life, not my IRL life. All that having been said, I don't really know what it looks like to "step back" from an online life, as someone who works online. Blog less? Tweet less? Have a paradigm shift regarding social media? But maybe instead of trying to figure out how to manage my online life, I'll just focus more on my local life and just see how that impacts how frequently I'm online doing things. Priorities!
