100 Days of Blogging: Day 99

This is the penultimate post of my 100 Days of Blogging project. Tomorrow will be the end of it and I could not be more ready. I will be taking at least a couple weeks off of social media and away from blogging starting on Wednesday. I’ve already been stepping away from social media quite a lot recently but I need a more official break. The biggest lesson I’ve learned about myself from this project is that I need to exist far less on the internet and far more in the real world. 

I’m feeling burnt out, overwhelmed, and annoyed with social media and virtual communication. I need to go find, build, and engage with the community around me and make local, in-person friends. I need to spend less time in front of screens and more time outside. I need to get out of my head, stop focusing only on the future goals I want to achieve and start doing more walking and learning to love where I’m at in the present.

I realized while walking to and from the movie theater last week that walking a city is the most impactful way for me to fall in love with it. Out of all of the places I’ve lived and visited, I’ve most enjoyed the areas I was able to do a lot of walking and I’ve been most eager to leave the places that I felt like I couldn’t get around without driving. Where I live now isn’t particularly ideal for walking, but it’s not at all impossible to walk around. Some routes are pretty inconvenient, but the more I push past my fears and mental blocks and just walk where I want to walk, the less trapped I feel.

I went for a nice long walk earlier today to get some iced coffee and brunch. I went through a part of town I hadn’t walked in before and I really enjoyed it. I need to do more of that and also work through my social anxiety to start making some local friends. So, after tomorrow, I’m going to take a massive step back from the virtual world and try my damndest to find joy and contentment in the real world at my fingertips. I’m gonna throw as much vitamin D and community connection at my depression as I can. I’m gonna take some time to reevaluate my relationship with the internet and think intentionally about how I want to share my writing and other creative work moving forward. And I’m gonna take the last few days of June and the rest of July to do it.