I have been working up gradually this year into cutting out my screen use. I was spending too much time passively consuming content and I wanted to be more present, in both my life and in the world at large. But it has been surprisingly hard to wean myself off of screens.

At first it was a compulsive habit. I would find myself after work with my phone in my hand, automatically opening an app. I wouldn’t even be conscious of the actions I was taking until a few seconds in. At this point, I would look down at the splash screen for whatever app I had opened and have a sudden burst of awareness that I wasn’t really interested in anything I was looking at. If I had enough willpower that day, I would close the app upon this realization. And if I still had any willpower left over after that, I would not open up my browser, or my camera roll, or some other distraction. Sometimes one of these digressions, spurred from trying to distract myself from another digression, would last for hours. When I finally pulled myself away from my phone of computer, the sun would have set. As soon as I saw that, my whole body would feel cold and empty. Internally, I was disappointed in myself for “wasting” so many days.

I had to go through the process of trying but failing to curb my screen time for a long time before I saw any real consistent progress. I would say that it took about a year. In that year I swallowed a lot of disappointment and eventually I had to stop beating myself up about it. Because while failing was bad, my self-admonishment was making it even worse. I eventually trained myself to see any day where I wasted less time as a good day, and just to leave it at that.

My timeline for cutting back was hindered by a stressful job that wiped my energy out so immensely that all I wanted to do most days was come home and scroll on my phone in bed. I remember once that I was so stressed out from my job that I came home and stayed up all night, restless, trying to distract myself by binge watching crap online and jumping down rabbit holes of information and pseudo-self-discovery. I stayed up so late that I didn’t feel comfortable going into work the next day, so I called off and slept all day. That day I made a pact to myself to stop wasting time online, trying to analyze or watch life rather than live it. The next day I had already broken the pact I made to myself.

But I kept at the process of trying and failing. I would mentally beat myself up for my perceived failures, then make another plan. I made and broke so many promises to myself.

Eventually, recently, and totally out of the blue, things started to get easier. The funny thing is that, externally, nothing much changed. Yet suddenly, after a year of battling with myself and my flabby willpower, I eventually had some kind of breakthrough. Black holes that used to drain my attention no longer appeal. Did my persistence pay off or did I just grow up? I can’t say for certain, but I will certainly take all the credit. I worked too hard not to.