Experiment: if I close twitter and log out of Facebook for a week (supplementing social internet needs with forum posts and reading blogs if I need to feel connected) what happens? Does the world seem less shitty? Do I break out of various funks long enough to work on projects? Am I happier?
I’ll let you know, I guess.
Tag break
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I’m not going to lie, I’ve been running myself ragged lately.
Sometimes it’s like, I don’t know how to not, you know?
I don’t know what a healthy balance is, and when the bulk of my work is creative it blurs the lines between shit I do for me and shit I do for other people/my job – because I would be making shit anyway.
I don’t know how to have projects and also not feel like I need to make up for something unless I’m doing so many things the day ends in exhaustion.
Like if I’m not doing all the things all the time then I’m not contributing and I hear my mom’s voice in my head telling me I’m lazy.
But then I’m running errands and have a mental breakdown in the car, and my calm is hard to get under control and I realize I’ve been doing a lot of putting-out, and not enough taking-in.
Even now, I’m fighting the urge to make more content – to film a KieryGeek episode or write a blog on KieryGeek.com because I haven’t touched it in ages, because gamergate is still on-going and I’ve been noticing all the sexism in my PS+ games. To add the text to the E.R.A. comic I drew over the weekend….or to delve deep into my psyche and figure out what the fuck is happening and what the trigger is that’s been poking me all week.
But I need to rest. And as guilty as I feel for not doing those things, a lot of them…..at this point, as much as I convince myself they’re for me, they’re really for other people, and that’s awesome and stuff…..but I don’t owe anyone my content right now. I owe myself a break.
And I needed to write that out so I could see it.
So I could maybe get back to minecraft or load WoW, or draw with pens because that is mine.
So I could convince myself not to work, and that the only person I owe things to right now is me.
We’re sort of slowly getting ready to move across the country in the spring, and so I’ve been trying to get rid of things – extra clothes, furniture, etc, that I’m not using/don’t need…nothing weird (except for maybe having been planning this move all year). I’ve been thinking about how nice it feels to have less random stuff, and so I may try to experiment with minimalism leading up to, and following The Great Moving Adventure. I did some reading (a few hours last night, nothing extensive by any means) and while everyone I read gave lipservice to minimalism looking differently for everyone, they all seemed to make a point to…..degrade keeping things for entertainment.
KieryGeek aside, this bothers me and isn’t something that would benefit me in my own minimalist excursion (depress, on the other hand…). While I’d like to live with less, and the idea of being minimalist appeals to me in a fight-the-machine-kind-of-way, I’m not going to give up my gaming consoles, my tv, or netflix because some random dudes on the internet say “it’s better” and that tv/gaming/entertainment-that-isn’t-reading-or-music is a waste of time (which, I thoroughly disagree with, for lots of reasons).
So, I’m gonna experiment with something I’m dubbing “keep-only-the-shit-that-you-like-ism!”. Which is still living with less, keeping only the things you need and enjoy, but basically, not eschewing the value of entertainment. I think any time anyone says “Stop gaming, it’s a waste of your time/life” I get angry and triggered. 😛
Anyway, aside from the STFU-gaming-is-good tangent, I think for me it will largely look like pack up whatever I can fit in my minicooper, getting rid of the rest, and hitting ikea for desks and a couch. 😉
As a personal quest, I’m going to only keep like 6 place (for the rare time the two of us have breakfast) settings so I have less dishes to wash on the chance that we get an apartment sans a dishwasher like our current place. I’ll probably do another run-through of my wardrobe, decide how badly I want to keep the ornaments that have pictures of baby kiery (which won’t ever make it on a tree, because no), and figure out how to travel-ize my jewelry collection (probably will throw it all in my makeup box. shhhh).
Anyway, the glorious part of keep-only-the-shit-that-you-like-ism, is that it’s about not having stuff you don’t like, but also not making a huge (anti-entertainment…) religion out of it either.
Okay, maybe those articles triggered me more than I thought they did.
In other news, I’m taking a mental health break. Right now that looks like muting a lot of twitter and playing a lot of minecraft and throwing personal comic schedules and completion to the wind while I try to catch my breath and chill. I feel like my brain needs a hard reset involving not noticing the world is going to shit and falling to pieces every 10 minutes. I may or may not update here with more thoughts or progress on minimalism, or anything deep, or anything at all. I don’t really know. Right now I’m just trying to give myself a break and figure out that I’m okay for existing and my validity isn’t dependent on anything else and it’s okay to not work myself ragged. Taking it one day at a time.
Today, I stayed in bed until I got hungry and needed coffee and then I basically only played minecraft. So, yeah. Don’t talk to me about wasting time on video games. Mental health is important too. 😛