A phased return

[dolorosa_12]

I am back on Dreamwidth after two weeks' or so self-imposed internet blackout (as I warned was likely on my previous post). That meant no social media, no news websites, deleting Substack/etc emails from my inbox with subject lines left unread, no blogs, and no Dreamwidth — essentially no internet that wasn't essential for work, life admin, or communicating with loved ones.

It was essential for my mental health, and I feel a lot better for it.

I'm now slowly easing my way back in, with Dreamwidth being the first phase. (I'm not looking at real-time social media until December.) I'm planning to read back through entries from the past two days or so, but I'm not reading further back than that (and I will be skipping over any posts related to US politics or its global consequences, since my state of mind is still too fragile to handle it). If there's anything that happened (other than politics stuff) to which you want to draw my attention, please do feel free to link to the post in the comments (or if it's access-locked you can share via Dreamwidth messages).

Life without non-work internet has been a mixture of productive, relaxing, and strange. In bullet point form, the main things that happened:

I spent the last weekend in London for Matthias's birthday. We ate some great food, I met some of his work colleagues, and we went to two fantastic exhibitions (the Silk Road one at the British Museum, and the Medieval Women one at the British Library — both excellent, but so crowded).

I read a lot of books and watched a lot of TV.

I finished my Yuletide assignment and wrote one treat, with hopefully more treats finished soon.

Our boiler broke and leaked water all over our ceiling (it's in the loft of the house) for three weeks before the engineers were able to replace it. We had to keep going up into the loft via a very unstable ladder and bail out the leaks with buckets of water, and it was incredibly stressful.

I found being offline incredibly lonely. I mostly work from home, and Matthias generally doesn't get home until after 7pm, so often I will be on my own from 7am-7pm in the house with zero human interaction. I didn't realise the degree to which I relied on passive online presence for a sense of human connection until I cut it out completely, and found myself going out on lots of walks and running unnecessary errands to the bakery so as to have at least those tiny moments of interaction. It was weird.

I'm so glad to be back here with you all.

Comments

Waves hello

[jesse_the_k]

Glad that the break did help and you learned some things!

The London museums sound delicious.

Boiler woes are the worst. Bailing out the attic? My sympathies.

Re: Waves hello

[dolorosa_12]

Thank you! I'm so lucky to live so close to London, and be able to visit exhibitions like that with relative ease.

Whenever something has gone wrong with the house previously, I've always calmed myself down by going 'at least it's not the boiler.' The boiler breaking was always my nightmare scenario. The boiler breaking during freezing temperatures, and leaking in the roof was my utter nightmare scenario.

Now that it's happened, I feel capable of coping with anything!

[pauraque]

Welcome back!

[dolorosa_12]

Thank you!

[trepkos]

How interesting that you didn't come back saying you felt refreshed! The boiler thing sounds AWFUL. So I suppose you have to redecorate now ...

[dolorosa_12]

I did feel refreshed, but I also just felt really lonely, and that — plus the boiler — probably contributed to a less than stellar feeling on my part. I feel washed clean, but not exactly bouncing with energy — the mental equivalent of how you feel when you come inside after having walked for a long time in horizontal rain.

The ceiling isn't damaged to the point of needing redecoration, because we caught it in time. (The hot water stopped working, so we went upstairs and saw water leaking, and were able to catch it in buckets before it did real damage. It just meant a lot of trips up and down a ladder into the loft until the engineers were able to replace it three weeks later.

[tactilemuse]

I know those feelings all too well. I think I just have to be done done with regular social media (IG mostly, as I don't have a FB/TikTok/Snapchat/Twitter), I am giving BlueSky a go but my timeline there is VERY curated towards art and photography. I'm glad you had time to reset and protect your peace. Taking the steps this year to patch my connection to other people has been challenging and honestly often times very lonely when people you thought you would still connect with offline just don't seem to have the time/energy to do so and don't have an interest in giving up socials/passive online acquaintance-ships.

[dolorosa_12]

I left Twitter last year and purged a decade's worth of tweets, and didn't replace it with Bluesky or anything else. I'd never enjoyed Twitter, and to be honest leaving it felt like a weight lifting from my shoulders. I remember hearing secondhand about some drama on Bluesky, and just feeling an overwhelming sense of relief that I didn't have an account and had no way of finding out any specific details — which confirmed my opinion that I was right not to rush onto a shiny new platform.

Instagram and Facebook never sparked that kind of feeling — the former is mainly a place where I follow pretty photography, lifestyle and cooking accounts, the latter is where I stay in touch with friends and family (I'm an immigrant so all my family is overseas, and for various reasons the overwhelming majority of my friends live in other cities or countries). However, without aggressive curation, both sites can become very overwhelmingly stressful, particularly at difficult political moments. Hence abandoning both of them until December.

In general, after I completed my PhD and stopped being a university student, I just ceased to have any offline social connections, other than work colleagues and friendly acquaintances, and I never really noticed this until I temporarily cut myself off from all my online social connections so dramatically.

[yarnofariadne]

Welcome back! I feel like breaks like that are really important to take, but the loneliness and disconnectedness does set in pretty quick. It's such a strange thing to have to balance.

[dolorosa_12]

Thank you! It is hard to balance, and to be honest it really brought home how isolated I am here when it comes to in-person social connections. I have lots of good groups of friends, but all the people who were previously in-person friends (secondary school and undergrad friends in Australia, postgrad friends I met after I moved to the UK) now live in other cities or other countries.

[corvidology]

Good to see you!

As you look over DW, I have to say that the people in my circle at least did a stellar job of putting anything political under a cut if they just had to say something before their head exploded.

[dolorosa_12]

Thank you, I'm glad to be back.

I agree (having read back a few days' worth of posts) that people are very good at cutting that kind of content, which is pleasing to see.

[corvidology]

I've been told by mates on other forms of social media that it got pretty rough but I think on DW, most of us form like-minded circles. Obviously we don't see everything the same way but are, shall we say, more politically aligned?

This meant we were willing to share woe if it helped but also that we knew we'd all need to avoid it at times/some of us all of the time.

[dolorosa_12]

Yeah, that's why I returned to Dreamwidth sooner but am not going back to what I term 'real-time social media' (in my case Instagram and Facebook) until December. All my Facebook friends share my values, so it's not like I was expecting to see gloating from my political opponents, but I am friends with a lot of Ukrainians on Instagram and knew I just would not be able to handle seeing their reactions to the existential consequences this election will have for them and their country.

I also knew that — no matter how politically aligned my social (media) circles were — I would see the following things:

Extremely raw, fearful, grieving reactions

Vitriolic arguments among progressives blaming each other for the result

People sharing and reacting to the vicious, gloating glee of political opponents who get a kick out of others' fear

And I didn't much care to see any of that, so I stayed away.

My own rule when it comes to politics is to avoid and block material (even if it comes from my own friends) that makes me feel despair or futility, and to stick to stuff which encourages concrete actions and a sense of communal and individual agency — and I've been online long enough to know where and when I will find both these things, and to act accordingly.

[forests_of_fire]

I'm glad you found the break helpful, but I'm also glad that you're back. <3

[dolorosa_12]

Thank you. <3

[chestnut_pod]

Welcome back! These are some interesting musings on your cold break. I'll be happy to see you around again.

[dolorosa_12]

Thank you — I'm glad to be back.

And yes, interesting is the right word for it. It showed me some rather worrying things about myself in a way that was impossible to avoid, that's for sure.

[thawrecka]

Welcome back!

[dolorosa_12]

Thank you!

[oracne]

Welcome back!

[dolorosa_12]

Thank you!

[umadoshi]

<3 <3 <3

[dolorosa_12]

<3

[lokifan]

Interesting to hear about those effects!

Hopefully I'll be seeing the Silk Roads exhibition! And the Hew Locke thing. They both sound amazing. (Ah, British Museum, truly my problematic fave.)

[dolorosa_12]

It's a great exhibition, but don't go on a Saturday morning if you can avoid it — so crowded!

Ah, British Museum, truly my problematic fave.

Haha, so true!

[svgurl]

Welcome back! It's good the break was helpful and it definitely sounds like you got a lot done, but I totally get the loneliness. That sucks about the boiler leak - how frustrating. Three weeks is a long time to have to wait to get it replaced.

[dolorosa_12]

Thank you — and yes, the break forced me to recognise a few things about my life, not all of which are good. I foresee some change in the future, that's for sure.

With the boiler, I think it was a matter of a) getting the replacement parts delivered and b) finding an available day when the gas engineers had an entire day free, since it was a job that took from 8am-4pm. Frustrating, but understandable. I'm just glad it's done!