journaling shows me that i truly have never changed

 so like. i am a messy journal-er. as a kid i had 5 journals going all at once since people were like "she likes to write, get her a notebook I guess" and that happened 5 times in quick succession. sometimes things like this actually annoy me since it means i don't get to choose the thing i want, but i digress. topic for another day. but once i finished all of them i started focusing on just having one and have gone through about 3 in my adult life thus far. i have notion as well, i've typed journal-y things on there, i've put them on here and on my other blog, and i use the "note to self" feature on signal quite often (something about the notes app is too cliche and does not appeal to me). so what this all sums up to say is: there are a lot of different thoughts scattered everywhere and every now and then I go back and read through them all. and apparently in march 2021 i was doing a very similar thing to right now. something about the end of february and beginning of march has me wanting to quit social media, i guess. My guess is that it follows this pattern of really going ham on things over christmas break, then having trouble moderating them in january and february (complete with a pattern of saying oh fuck it i'm addicted in the beginning of february, i suspect) and then by march I am so done. Not to mention march is the second worst month of the year (after november) and thus i think a time just replete with frustration. 

so here I am, on my annual social media cleanse or whatever. social media absence. break. vacation. i dunno. It's producing some new feelings, though, confirmed by the journal entries I've read from last year. Chief among these feelings is a sense of freedom. Free from notifications, from pressure to interact, from the fucking self-discipline required in me to not start arguments every time someone Is Controversial Online. Just free from it all. 

I've also noticed that the way I approach it has changed. only recently have i even bothered to ask myself what i used to do before all of this (and lord how grateful I am to have existed with a memory before this was all a thing). But when I go down that rabbit hole it reveals that my time online has always been consuming. there was the membase era, the old time spent watching skits and pop song parodies on youtube (though back then I used to return to the same video often), the msn instant messenger era (now THAT was a time), and even before that there was the barbie and pollypocket online websites with lots of flash games. back then i had to at least ask to use the family computer. But there was also a lot of time spent deep in microsoft word, writing. there was a lot of time spent on books. and when I was at school, smartphones really weren't a thing until I got to high school, and even the old ones weren't the same as they are now. i didn't even have a cell phone of my own until high school, and then for years it was a blackberry (yes, i have rich parents). i spent a lot of time doodling, actually studying, and spending so long working on backwards alphabet code that at one point i could write and read it semi-fluently (ivzo lmvh pmld dszg r nvzm) (bvh, r szw gl dirgv gsrh xlwv lfg ztzrm gl (kzrmhgzprmtob) dirgv gsrh) so that nobody could read my secret notes about my crush or my feelings or whatever. of course back then school was mostly paying attention to an activity or having quiet reading time and i didn't have to entertain myself so much or plan my own schedule like i do now, and even if i wanted to spend hours scrolling through little videos, i couldn't. there wasn't a place to do that.

what I'm saying is that I suspect i will have to lean more on those things. unfortunately flash no longer works and i don't really want to have people peering over my shoulder at school to catch me on barbie.com anyway, but really i know i can't literally go back. nobody can. so many things don't exist or have better alternatives now that mean it really doesn't make sense to go back to something objectively worse (take, for example, the point and shoot digital camera, when now everyone has one on their phone that is fairly good quality unless you are a professional, in which case a point and shoot was never the answer anyway). but i can go back to the spirit of those things. the spirit of wasting time. heck, i even spent time in this very lab in high school, phoneless and doing time wast-y things. of course now i have like, actual work to do, but when i'm waiting for something it feels better even to play a little game on my phone than to scroll social media. at least i know the world of the game is fake. the world of instagram and tiktok feels real enough that i can lose myself in it.

and this time, i'm getting back to writing. when i read 'are you actually going to write a novel or just talk about it' (or at least the first part, since i haven't fulfilled the challenge of the first bit yet) i had this idea that i'd publish a post on my other blog once a week, but then shit got busy and i was spending 8 hours a day on cell culture work (which is very much equivalent to the physical and mental stress of driving for all that time) and just did not have the time to craft the kind of thoughtful post I wanted to put up over there, nor did I want to work on this novel I've been writing for well over 10 years that I can't seem to figure out. I barely wanted to do anything because i came home so exhausted. and this is where i think something like this blog may come in handy. because i have no rules for myself here except that i want to post every day in march. you may notice i don't even follow every grammatical rule. 

once again, here's to this.