Well, here's to this

just learned all of 5 minutes ago that the app I use to track my self-harm progress (I Am Sober) has way more social features than I realized. Unfortunately that seems completely antithetical to the entire point to me, especially as all the social features are overrun with teenagers and I just ... really cannot relate to the self harm struggles of a 16 year old (nor can they mine, we are in different worlds with different struggles). made it to 1 month today, which is lovely but so frustrating as I gave up a 2 year streak. the slow and monotonous work of just continuing to live life at normal speed while wanting that streak back is ... well. slow and monotonous. surprise, surprise.

the reason i noticed this is that I deleted all my social media apps today, and am starting 1 month of trying to be free of it. I put a little notice on my instagram bio, not because I think I am very popular and important but because I sort of feel like friends will just message me on there and if I stop answering it will look very cryptic. I'm just tired of wasting time on that, i'd like to enjoy wasting time on other things, like this. at least writing this counts as writing, as an act of creation. it also does not contain behavioral algorithms, which is a plus.

I thought maybe I'd pair my 31 days of no social media with 31 days of writing on this blog. i am strongly considering a writing career after graduation but am badly out of practice. Hence: low-stakes, low stress, but consistent blogging on my personal blog that is whatever the opposite of search-engine-optimized is. search-engine antagonized. i want to not be found. don't come looking.

i jest, of course, if you have been brought here through the hands of fate, then welcome, enjoy. 

my goal for the whole no social media thing is actually just what I say it is, which is that I don't really enjoy the fact that I am getting sucked up into the world of whatever app I use. I find myself becoming a very angry, unpleasant, irritating person and honestly, I would like to test a hypothesis that this is because of the apps themselves, and personally I would like to be a happy, pleasant, normal person who is only, like, a government-rationed amount of irritating. I've been taking more than my fair share for far too long.

That was actually a thought I had the other day as I pondered my many enemies on the long and arduous walk downhill from my car to the building at my university where i work. It still seems odd to me that I have never had any trouble getting along with others in any capacity my entire life and have always made friends easily and yet still there are about 4 people in the world who bitterly hate me. In each scenario with each person I can see where I went wrong and why they were angry, but I cut them all off for very specific reasons having to do with not wanting to be treated like garbage after making mistakes. But still. I am only 27. I feel like I have a much higher enemy-to-years-of-life ratio than most people I know, perhaps more than is wise. Looking at that ratio with no context, one may assume I was a bully in high school. That's not really the kind of reputation I want. But it occurred to me, as I pondered about self-awareness (which I heard about through an NIH seminar series about mental health and wellbeing for biomedical researchers, concisely abbreviated as MHWBBMR in my google calendar), and considered that I may actually just kind of be an offensive person.

It's not like that was a huge surprise- people have been telling me I'm opinionated and argumentative for much of my life, I even got "feisty" once- but it really did shift the way I think about myself. I didn't have this narrative of myself as an innocent lamb who is at the evil whims of others, but a person who is generally inoffensive probably has a lower enemy count. I'm not totally sure what to do with the information except to consider that it may be something that hinders me professionally (and I suspect it already has) and that I may want to... I dunno. work on that? or something? I think it ties into my generally open nature- I am very predictable, I wear my heart on my sleeve, I don't hide my opinions, that sort of thing. Perhaps it is better to be a bit closed-off some of the time. Be a little mysterious. That sort of thing. I just sort of hate that because I think anyone who deals with me knows what they are getting, and I like to know that about others, but alas, I am still unable to control the behavior of others.

Anyway. I think I've wasted enough time, I still have an experiment to start (and I even already dealt with the shitty part of measuring out cisplatin and my trust issues with the scale that is never constant, so I'm not even putting that off) and some work to do at my second job, and some sleep deprivation to catch up on, so like. I guess if you're really excited about this you can wait until tomorrow and there will be more. maybe. Bye.