💾 Archived View for mouseless.cities.yesterweb.org › thoughts › anxiety captured on 2023-11-04 at 11:17:54. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-06-16)
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I've been working on my relationship with social media, and that's meant I've been confronting a lot of anxiety head on. The feeling of "Wow, I bet people miss me, they must really want to talk to me" makes me anxious. The subsequent "Wow, they didn't really care I was gone" makes me anxious *and* sad.
It's been hard for me. My current strategy has been to "charge myself" $1 each time I open a particular chatroom that's been stressing me out. That's really made me think about "are the conversations I might see worth a dollar?" and stuff like that. There's currently a bit of a loophole, where if I click there out of habit, I'm incentivised to "make the most of it". Haven't figured out a good solution for that yet, but the negative feeling that comes from telling my partner the number went up has helped me avoid it too.
To be frank, it's not very healthy either, but I want to disrupt the patterns in my brain, that dopamine craving of constant social stimulation. No idea if it's a good strategy, but I'm too poor for therapy.
Part of my arsenal of "things to do instead of social media" has been fiddling with Gemini. It would have been my HTTP site, but I messed up my static site generator's files, and it wasn't set up with git so... That in itself makes me anxious to touch it, so I haven't.
As a long time gemini appreciator from afar, I feel...odd, about some of the changes on geminispace. There's a full blown bbs-style site, and it's just so... It's so traditional social media, and I don't know if that's what I need right now. It's fun to see a more complex project brought to life, but... I guess my issues are with people and the internet, not any particular internet protocol. It's nice to imagine that things will be better if you change this one single thing. But it's always more complicated than that.
I did figure out how to make an account there, though. Technologically, I think it's super neat, though there's no mice related emoji to choose from. I think if I plan on going there more often I might request the 🧶 emoji, just going for a mouse is predictable and boring. (though it would round out the list of animal emoji they had to choose from)
(bbs rambles continue over here)
Maybe it's just me. But my certain flavour of perfectionism leaves me in that 'analysis-paralysis' where you can't do the thing at all, because you can't do it perfectly. That one's been haunting me lately. I have two tasks and because I was too anxious to do them sooner, I feel like doing them now is still a failure. (even though for one of those things, struggling to do a basic thing like this only serves to help my case, because I'm applying for help)
I do what I can, when I can, but I'm embarrased to admit basic conversations like "Tell the Etsy seller the single measurement they need to make your item" suck it out of me. I just... can't! It's too much. I can't deal with it.
I love nature. I'm terrified to leave my house. I desperately want to go outside. The thought of doing so often gives me a panic attack.
Brains don't care about logical fallacies and "incompatible beliefs", so I'm stuck living with them. I'm so lonely and desperate for interpersonal relationships, no matter how superficial or small talk-y, and yet the thought of talking to the person at the counter in a store makes me sweat.
I don't have any profound takes on life this time. It just kinda sucks, and it helps to be aware of your brains own weirdness, so here I am doing that.