So I've been thinking lately about what things or conditions truly help me, calm me down, give me space to breathe, etc. What subjects feed my soul, what do I truly love that makes me feel like there's some reason to go on, what makes me forget the usual mantras. This line of thought started during the ice storm, when I ran out of Diet Coke and started drinking so much tea. The tea literally puts me in a meditative state -- provided I drink it mindfully. Or maybe that's the thing. I dunno. I just know when I take the time to make the tea properly, sit down in a quiet room or with some soothing non-frantic music playing, I feel better. At peace.

Maybe I'm getting old, I dunno. But I have to start digging myself out of this hole I'm in and not just mentally race around the same old crazy.

This kind of path can lead you to some uncomfortable truths. For one, Warcraft is a net negative effect. It's a stressor. It makes you forget, sure -- the same way TV does. It's not constructive, though when I started playing it was. For all that I'm an officer in one of the largest guilds on our server, I have a grand total of 2 people I talk with semi-regularly -- Kill and another Gnome mage named Morgianna (another older lady like myself, we have much the same experiences in WoW so we commiserate a lot). Otherwise, there are names I know because they are often troublemakers. But they're not friends. Also the frustrations of just playing the game get to me a lot, which just adds to it all. Zoning out on farming motes in Nagrand is not a healthy kind of forgetting. It's the kind that leads to "what the hell, it's 11 PM already, where did the time go?" and waking up the next morning feeling like the previous night wasn't restful at all.

Problem there is, I love Warcraft. But it ain't healthy for me.

Further along that line, the realization that spending every night and most of my days off in front of the computer is only exacerbating things. It's alienated me from a lot of things that used to be of interest to me, such as my mythology studies, my writing, my crystal collection, the podcasts I used to get into, the ambient music I used to get into. My hippy side. The psychospiritual side of me.

Playing Warcraft, mindlessly checking Fark or my RSS feeds and the fanfic sites, it's just escapism. It's not dealing with myself. It's worsening all my problems, not helping me to heal. It's not letting me think beyond a narrow set of parameters. It's not just Warcraft that's the drug, it's the whole shebang. Everything I do in my life.

As I said, uncomfortable truths.

But the tech is inescapable. It's woven into my life. The tech itself isn't bad. It's what I'm choosing to do with it that's screwed. And it's not going to be solved in a day. No more than heroin addiction is.


And aside from pulling myself out of this, there's the larger issue of my job and my life circumstances in general.

But we will see.