Awaken for a moment from your dark night

Happy Halloween! I'm on here because lately I have been feeling terribly noisy in my head and am therefore doing a sort of cleanse that includes reducing my time on Twitter dot com. Thus, I am in need of another outlet for my thoughts and another record of daily life, and where better than my original social medium* that is arguably better than Twitter for both of those things?

Yes, it's very noisy up here, and I consequently feel overwhelmed am unable to give my focus to tasks that deserve it, such as writing. When my mind is already filled with noise, it's so easy to dump in more noise and so difficult to clear it enough to work on anything requiring brainpower.

So I've set some resolutions for what I am calling No Noise November. I'm not necessarily aiming to last the month; I'm just going until I figure out how these new habits work for me. The resolutions are:

• Reduce Twitter dependency. On both my phone and my laptop, I've logged out of all accounts except my locked, and I've muted (nearly) everybody on my locked to break the habit of refreshing my feed every two minutes. I'm keeping the app on my phone for DMs and to pop onto friends' profiles directly when I wonder how they're doing. I'm very interested in the idea that it is possible to be friends with a person without having their thoughts injected directly into my brain twenty times a day. What a concept.
• Stop wasting time on YouTube. My YouTube dependency is bad. I essentially use it like TikTok, clicking video after video until I find two hours have elapsed without my noticing. I am banning myself from YouTube unless there is a specific video I am looking for on there, and even then, I gotta ask myself if I really need to watch it.
• Stop wasting time on AO3. God. Since getting back into Harry Potter, I keep finding logging on to AO3 at 11 pm to read a short little bedtime story—mainly Remus/Sirus, but it surprises even myself just how much shit I'll go for—and suddenly it's 2 am and I need to be awake in four hours. No AO3 after 9 pm if I have work the next day.
• Listen to less rock and pop music and more moody instrumental music. This resolution is similar to when I was having anxiety a couple of years ago and took a break from horror. I love rock and pop, but they are noisy genres. I think more clearly and more creatively when I listen to ambient music. I'm neutral on folk and R&B right now; they don't help me think, but they don't overwhelm my brain, either. I'm not going to delete rock and pop music entirely from my fall playlist because I still want to get to know these songs that interest me. But after several weeks of Zeal & Ardor, My Chemical Romance, Taylor Swift, and Lizzo, I'm shifting focus.

I think that will be it. Target the problem and leave the rest.

Halloween was nice. I had thought about going to a punk show called Hardcore Halloween on Saturday—I'd tossed around the idea of punching up my standard Hamburglar costume with a punk jacket and black metal makeup—but when the day came, I was tired and, as mentioned, mentally overwhelmed. Instead, I spent the day watching Taylor Swift interviews on YouTube (because I have a problem!!!!!), and on Sunday, I had the Sims in my Sims 2 Asylum Challenge throw a Halloween party. Today, I dressed as Cesare from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It was a very last minute costume that absolutely nobody recognized, but I got good reactions to the makeup anyway, and more importantly, I had fun doing it.

* Edit: Oh my god, it was only after I posted this entry that I realized this isn't LiveJournal. Whatever. My Dreamwidth is my LiveJournal. It is effectively my LiveJournal.