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

[oracne]

Welcome back!

[dolorosa_12]

Thank you!