4 - reflections after a month of trying to be less on social media
It has been officially one month since I started blogging for personal mental clarity, turned off or kept away from most of my social media and designated my art account on Bluesky to be the only "active" social media I'll allow myself to use consistently. This came about in an effort to be more clear-headed especially since my mother has already started chemotherapy for her breast cancer, and I felt like I needed to be "stable" if I want to actually be able to care for her alongside my sister, and I surmised that I can't do that if my head is cluttered with discourse and information overload that comes from social media.They say you need about a few weeks for a habit to really stick, so after about a month I figured it'd be a good time to reflect upon how much has changed since then:
I definitely found myself talking more actively on friends' Discord servers & one-to-one chats. I've said a few times in previous posts that I'm a chronic yapper and the Urge to Yap is especially felt when I'm no longer in a fandom space on Bluesky - talking to friends more about specific OC stuff gave me an outlet to yap away as I want, and I feel like the best thing about this is it's within the confines of an audience that I do only want - even when I do want to talk about things, sometimes I do feel too conscious about how many eyes are on my thoughts. I believe at the time of writing, my fandom-focused social media (FFXIV) account was sitting at 500-something followers, which is nice, but still it did felt like too many eyes were on it. In a small discord server where the population was simply friends and mutuals, or within a DM with someone else that's on the same level as freak as me, it felt a lot more freeing to write and share what I want to share and know that it's in a confined space.
Drawing more. Instead of doomscrolling, I took the time to draw when I feel like I was bored or anxious and need to doomscroll. That has led to a lot of sketches and drawings this month alone, and I felt like I've Achieved Something.
I mentioned in a previous blog post that this year I've had a really bad art rut, and privately practicing the fundamentals and going back to the basics has helped a lot. Choosing deliberately to replace doomscrolling with drawing also helped - even if only just the practice of cubes from different perspectives in a suspended space for 10 minutes or some gesture drawings, that helps stave off the urge to doomscroll. I do highly recommend it, actually.
Touching grass more (very big improvement)! I actually managed to finish Befriending the Quran: A Beginner's Guide to Nurturing Closeness to the Quran by Ayesha Syahira and that actually was because of one very crucial thing: I was going out more. I read the whole thing as I commute in the LRT throughout this month, either to and from my medical appointments, going out with friends, or just need to have my own peace and quiet away from my phone. We don't talk a lot about how being on your phone constantly fatigues you, I think - and for me being fatigued means I'm less likely to go out for any reason, so having less reason to stay on social media meant I have more mental energy to actually get out of the house. The last legs of December especially have witnessed me logging more than 10k steps throughout the week, with 27 December being the day I actually logged 10k steps for the entire day (went out to lunch with friends and then went window shopping in MyTown Cheras - I now understand why my aunt makes window shopping her favorite weekend activity). Maybe I'll do more window shopping next year, or just make any excuse to go out with a chosen book at hand and find a comfortable space to read, and enjoy the journey of walking there in the process. I did have plans to go to the PJ Community Library as it were...
(Unexpected development) my gposing got better? If you have no idea what "gposing" means, "gpose" is the shortened form (and command) in Final Fantasy XIV, where you can activate the game's "photo mode" and take pictures of your character. There are third party tools that expands how much you can do in the photo mode, one of which involves posing your characters like an actual 3D model (similar to Garry's Mod & MMD). I feel like points 1 and 3 have been especially instrumental in my improvement in this surprisingly - 1 being I get to see and talk about how my gposing game can be improved, and 3 in the sense that artistic improvement means that translates into gposing improvement too. You can look at my FFXIV blog to see my screenshots!
All in all, this has been a pretty good month. I'm still scrolling on my bluesky, don't get me wrong, but I'm honestly happy that instead of doomscrolling take after take, my "scrolling" is now full of art, especially now that X screwed up again and had a lot of artists moving out of X and migrating to other social media sites such as Bluesky. It's nice to be able to see more art on my feeds and getting the most out of it! But I'll continue to keep these habits into the new year, and consider another platform to write rapid-fire posts without being tethered to social media (I just discovered something called Micro.blog and I might set that up for that sort of posting)!
May the coming year ahead be kinder to all of us!