Words Of An Idle Mind

Addiction & Detachment

Sometimes, I don't understand myself.

Me. I'm a complex entity that has bones,  flesh,  mass, and something  fishy right under my cranium.

This brain of mine, has an addiction, not the one people suffer from, but the one that people  un-suffer from.

I've bouts of detachment unexplained.

And I'm addicted to it.

I'm  addicted to detachment.

Let's  go a few paces back and understand where I'm coming  from, and what led me to my self-diagnosis and the consequential conclusion.

I'm a young adult who still has persistent teenage moods time and again. As a result, I deal with identity crisis and my role in life,  especially  in the 'big picture' way almost  daily. It's not so much a battle as much as a game of ping-pong, or table tennis, or badminton,  or any game where an object is passed back and forth, back and forth,  back and forth.

I'm  the object, and there are more than 2 players  in this game, most of whom are difficult to identify.

Inadvertently, I turn to social media, especially  Instagram, where I can choose and unchoose a set of people I want to share my life with. I can simply detach them from my existent frame of reference when they do something  that unsuits me. Simple,  isn't  it?

This is the modern day detachment.

My case is a little peculiar, because I don't often remove people from my social media, as often I remove myself  from it.

And coming from a teen-just-glimpsimg-adulthood who constantly stays online with numerous people to engage and chat about 14 hours of the 12 she is awake, this might sound obnoxious (because  it is), I'm sick of it.

But I'm  addicted to it as well.

So everytime I remove myself  from the online social circle, I deprive myself of my most active human contact (funny how it's virtual), and I put myself  through self-induced so-called isolation, with bare minimum contact with a handful of people. This way, I eventually  experience  withdrawal symptoms, anxiety,  loneliness,  helplessness,  frustration, irritation, mood swings,  all of these, all at once.

And then, I give myself the self-proclaimed liberty to go online again, to end my self-created state of misery. And then the online time increases  from 14 to 16 hours of the 12 I'm awake.

And every time I do this, for whatever time period, a day,  few days,  few weeks, I come back more active,  more insta-productive. And then I self-loathe, for giving in to the addiction.

Wasn't  the detachment supposed  to reduce it?

In my opinion, I'm as attached to Instagram, as I'm  to detachment, and I can't decide what more  threatening to me.

I live a fairly privileged life with all the amenities and luxuries that I can have and I create complex problems for myself because I honestly have nothing better to do.

I make up my mind, to detach from anyone online, so I do it by going  offline, instead of removing  them from my list,  as so often other people do. Maybe I don't want to be the bad guy, the mean girl,  the arrogant one.
Maybe I can't  really  say no and let people go without feeling  guilty for it.

I'm not someone with answers to  questions  I have, but I have probable hypothesis on what causes my dynamic state  of mind to tick. And sometimes,  the hypothesis stand true.