Blerg

My brain is broken

I published my first blog post 2 years ago today!

I wanted to write a nice post about how proud I am for sharing my posts publicly, but the words just won’t come.

What I’m experiencing is…a broken brain.

I feel like ever since I got pregnant, my creativity has been zapped. Yes, I am tired from new motherhood/grad school, but it’s more than that. My attention span is shot. I do not have any “dead time” for my brain to recharge. I am ALWAYS checking my phone.

I have done so many things to try to break my phone addiction! I quit Instagram 4 years ago. I have text notifications muted. My screen and all of my icons are in grayscale. AND YET….I still pick up that stupid little brick a billion times a day. I am getting better. My daily screen time used to be between 3-4 hours a day and now it’s around 2. But I can’t get this stat out of my brain:

1) If you spend 3 hours a day on your phone, it ends up being 10 years of your waking adult life. Read that again. A decade of your waking life. Think about how long a year is. Now think about how long ten years is. Now imagine spending all of that time, ten years of your precious adult life, watching TikTok and bouncing between candy-colored icons on a metal rectangle. Now try not to throw up.Catherine Shannon

TEN YEARS!?! Is that math right!? I am too lazy to check but it doesn’t really matter.

I took a human development class this summer when I was 8 months pregnant. The teacher showed this clip:

The "still-face experiment," also known as the "stone face baby experiment," is a classic study where caregivers, typically mothers, are instructed to maintain a neutral, expressionless face while interacting with their infants, demonstrating how babies react to a lack of emotional connection and their ability to seek and respond to it.

I started bawling. It was actually quite embarrassing.

Recently I read Haley Nahman’s post on her phone addiction and this part really struck me:

And so sometimes—every day if I’m being honest—I go on my phone just out of her view. I hide the phone behind my leg, as anti-screen parents do, so that if she looks over, she’ll merely observe my eyes cast perpetually downward

And I realized that staring at your phone is essentially stone facing your baby. This broke me. My husband and I stone face our son all the time and it makes me so upset to even type this.

Back to

Catherine Shannon

who had a son around the same time as me:

Two things happened with my baby. One, he reached for it, spellbound, whenever he saw it. And two, I was doing something unimportant, scrolling, and I looked up and saw he was smiling at me. This had happened a few times before—and countless times when I’m doing other things, like the dishes—but this particular instance stung in a way I can’t quite explain. If I didn’t make a change for myself, I should at least do it for him. The last thing I want to be in his eyes is a hypocrite.

It truly wrenches my heart to think that my son looks up at me after doing something and instead of getting a response, he sees me stone-faced and staring at my screen.

I used to be a daydreamer. I loved to daydream! I remember one of my college roommates coming into our room to find me splayed out on my bed staring at the ceiling. “Do you do this often?” she asked. “All the time,” I replied. And it was true. I loved to get lost in my mind.

lol this is me in Yosemite my senior year of high school. I think I had an iPhone but I was not addicted to it.

I often complain to my husband about how our generation got robbed compared to our parents. They got to work without email! They mailed things and called it a day! No obsessively checking their phones, no Slack messages! You could actually turn your brain off.

But what makes me most sad is the loss of “dead time.” Specifically the post-dinner doomscrolling. My husband and I do it. We do it when we visit with my parents. We all sit in the living room together and are completely alone. We are all lost in our devices. These moments break me in a very particular way.

I don’t even go to the bathroom without my stupid little phone. My poor brain is constantly flooded. I don’t even have any apps to check! Without social media, I became addicted to the photos app. I would mindlessly look at the memories that Google Photos fed me. If I couldn’t stare at the vacations of people I went to college with, I would stare at my own vacations! So now I have set a 15-minute timer for photos. And I still regularly override this limit….

Without dead time, I feel constantly depleted. What I am trying to say is that I never “fill the well.” Yes, I am going to quote Julia Cameron.

In Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way," "filling the well" refers to nurturing your creative consciousness and inner artist through activities that bring joy, spark curiosity, and replenish your creative energy.

When I was in middle and high school I spent so much time searching (on Limewire lol RIP to our family desktops) looking for new music. I know I am depressed when I stop listening to music. I realized this in 2018 when I was hitting a wall a work and had my first panic attack.

But if I’m honest my music tastes have been stunted since I started working. Ever since I graduated college and became a “worker,” I have prioritized podcasts and productivity over music and pleasure.

How do I get my groove back? I put my phone in my room half an hour ago to write this post and I am already itching to go check it. But I think today will be a phone free day. We’ll see if that’s even possible.

Do you give yourself any dead time or do you mindlessly fill it? How do you fill the well?

Have a great weekend and thank you so much for reading. It means the world to me, truly!