My Journey to the Dark Side

"The greatest teacher, failure is." - Yoda, "The Last Jedi"


This week brought about my first real failure on my 75/25 Create/Consume project.* I spent Thursday night through Sunday night off the project engaged in a veritable orgy of novel-reading and tumblr-scrolling. It started with a fairly reasonable excuse but turned into a full-on binge. I'm determined, however, to get back on track and use my failure as a lesson.


What happened


It started Thursday night. I'd been exhausted and in pain all day, and I was running a fever. When I got home I had no energy for anything, so I started reading "Americanah" again, which had been my source of distraction between phone calls at work. Intermittently I was also checking in with Dr. Google trying to figure out whether I had some sort of life-threatening illness like meningitis, the first ailment to pop up when I typed in my symptoms. Anxiety over my health combined with the fever kept me awake until early in the morning. I was too tired to do much productive and not thinking clearly enough to make myself meditate, so I spent the wee hours consuming all the minutes I'd been saving up during the week and more.

We got up to see "The Last Jedi" early Friday morning. This viewing was supposed to be my triumphant reward for a week of flawless adherence to my project, squirreling away consumption minutes through my creative acts. The victory was gone, though. All I felt was a sense of guilt for the previous evening's binge. The movie, nevertheless, was worth it. Indeed, it was the first movie in a while which had felt really worth my time and attention, despite some structural flaws.**

After the movie, though, my fever was still there, or so I thought. We stopped to get a thermometer and it turned out I was running an abnormally low temperature, even though I felt very hot. I spent the rest of the day in bed, hydrating and resting, and since I was already a lost cause, I figured why not just keep reading. So I did. I vowed I was going to do better Saturday, but Saturday, after Lee and I took a walk around our neighborhood, I felt about the same, so I came home and read some more. By this time I was also deep into "Last Jedi"-related material on Tumblr and elsewhere on the internet, so returning to the program seemed even less appealing. I was sure, though, that I was going to turn over a new leaf on Sunday.

This morning, however, I woke up at 11 - already a bad start - and immediately turned to Facebook and Tumblr. By today, though, I had also begun to feel the sick, hungover, and even dirty due to the over-consumption of media. The temporary excitement had worn off and I started feeling exhausted by all the sensory input - the chaotic emotional rollercoaster of Facebook, the bizarre and petty shipping wars on Tumblr***, the general state of distress caused by the Trump administration and our corporate overlords in general. Tonight, making a batch of cookies after work, I knew my lost weekend was definitely over when I tried to put on "one last thing" ("Pee-Wee's Christmas Special", usually a yearly tradition), and had to turn it off when K.D. Lang started belting out "Jingle Bell Rock." It felt too noisy, too intrusive, too much. I knew I was ready to go back to my new status quo, my Project 75/25.


What I Learned


1. I need to make a better plan for what happens when I get really sick. Sticking to the project as written is not going to cut it, after all. I was just a little sick the first week when I soldiered on. Friday night, however, there was no way that writing or drawing or even sleeping or meditating was going to take the place of relaxing myself with distractions until I fell asleep. It might be better, therefore, to have an allotment of, say, 2 hours a night when I'm sick, or maybe 2 hours per 6-hour period.

2. The phone should not be part of that plan. I'd like to give myself some free minutes, but they shouldn't be on the phone. This is largely because I use the phone for three main things: Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram, and not one of those things helps me to sleep or relax. In addition, it led me to keep consulting Dr. Google long after I'd exhausted the options. So, I get minutes, but not phone time, just book time or, at worst, Netflix time.

3. The phone should not be next to my bed. I'm going to have to work out a new place for my phone. Next to the bed is the worst place for the phone to be, because the moment I get up in the morning is one of my daily low points for willpower, right up there with the last thing before I go to bed at night. Having the little temptation box right by my face, therefore, is not a good idea.

4. I don't like consuming as much as I think I do. It's a compulsion. A lot of my consumption is not for pleasure. It's to chase away anxiety. It's to distract me from pain. It's to alleviate boredom. But it's not for pleasure. Of course I've been reiterating some version of this lesson in basically every post in this blog, but this weekend made that clearer than ever. I really don't like what I become when I consume media on a constant basis. It feels like crap and creates a negative feedback loop where I consume more to avoid feeling like crap and then feel like more crap.

5. You can learn even from a setback. Even though this weekend was "lost" in a sense, in another sense I did gain some things from it. Insight into this project, an unexpected heart-to-heart with Lee which led to greater closeness, and some new ideas for things to create. So, I emerged from the dark side, and I'm ready to rejoin my own personal rebellion.


*http://7525createconsume.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-project.html Basically, I am aiming to create 3x what I consume in terms of content.

**And at some point I might write a review of the movie, just for fun. I think I want to see it one more time first, though.

***Shipping is something I am going to have to write about at some point. I am a shipper to some extent, but some people on Tumblr can get involved in ships to the point where they become quite nasty and extremely dramatic in general.

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