As I lay pinned-down by the fatigue of my sickness, I can't help but feel lucky. I'm part of a generation that discovered the internet way before their parents. I probably have too many e-mail addresses I can no longer access, nor remember, gently burning the forests with their server space usage. Yet, I didn't fall in too deep in the mud. I barely touched TikTok, I left Instagram, I successfully limited my YouTube usage. I'm not even compulsively getting lost in the daydreams, with music blasting through my headphones for hours on end. No, I'm laying still, feeling the infection swelling and scratching my throat, my bones getting crankier within the flesh, I'm stripped naked in front of my thoughts and anxieties.
I'm free, right? Compared to my peers and their daily of two, three, seven hours of screentime, I am probably having more of the intentional activities in my daily life, whether I'm cleaning the living room, writing over here, or annoying my boyfriend. All of that beats watching a YouTube short I'll forget about by the afternoon.
So why do I feel the time relentlessly chasing me down through my days? There's always someone to look at and decide I haven't done enough. I try to rationalize and tell myself that with my circumstances, there was no other outcome for me (hell, I don't even believe in free will, on a rational level), yet I burn like a cheapskates butane processing plant in the climate-change summer anytime a match of someone's success flies my way.
It's not really about them. It's just a hunger I cannot possibly satisfy. It's a tempo I crave, but am not mature to play.
I said I feel lucky in the beginning, because I was wasting my time and motivation on other people's insta stories or some other empty packages of sort. Yet, it's not enough to just step away from the shiny shelves. It takes time to build the muscles, I guess.
For some strange reason, I feel like the tempo would, in fact, make me happy. I mean, the usual way this hunger was described by the people around me when I was a little girl, was something along the lines of: "Man always seeks for more. More power, more influence, more money. But he is never happy, never satisfied." Yet I believe it would make me happy. Maybe because it's not more money or whatever that I'm after, it's more creation, more meaning, more intentionality.
Tell you what, I won't ignore what I believe. I regretted that a couple of times already, and that's a couple of times too many. Even if I'm wrong, I'll know I tried something I truly thought would work. Nothing worse than having someone else's idea fail on you, and then you're additionally mad for not trusting yourself.
So far, it never happened that I regretted something I truly chose for myself.