It’s summertime, baybee!!

Hello!!! This is the first time I am writing to you in 2026.

That fact makes me sad. I have been having a really hard time in life this year.

But as of exactly one week ago, I’ve been in a really good headspace!

I think the burnout has finally partially faded thanks to summer vacation, as I don’t believe it can fully disappear in this time since it’s too short.

I know once I return to work things will probably get very low again.

But that moment is not right now, and now is all we have! So I am determined to live in the moment and enjoy myself for the time being.

Last Thursday I was on my usual morning walk, and I just got the sudden feeling that everything was going to be okay.

And it has only been one week, but things are indeed okay!

I feel a much needed sense of normalcy this past week.

I got super inspired on my walk that morning by the videos I was listening to about being on social media less (ironic, I know)

and so when I got home I went to canva and made up a lil experiment with guidelines and a tracker!!!!

As you can see, my average screentime was sitting at SIX HOURS!!!!!

There were two days the week prior that i hit TEN HOURS. TWO DAYS IN A ROW.

I’m sorry but that is abysmal omfg.

So the goal was simply to get lower than 6 hours, and practice moderation when it came to my most used social media.

Youtube was a loose limit because as an ADHD girlie I truly use it for everything, and so the goal that is not clear on my paper is that the goal is to only use youtube for up to an hour on pure entertainment, but useful content I am choosing and using with intention is allowed to a reasonable extent. That is something I figured out after typing the guidelines out.

But I did in fact put a 1 hour timer on all other apps, and I have only hit up to like 20 minutes on my most used apps so far, every single day.

Not once have I hit the limit with an app!

There is proof of the limits!

But yeah, I have not come close to 6 hours even once.

(I am also using my computer with untracked screen time just to let you know! But I’m using it with the same guidelines on other things, not on social media. I do not count all screen time as bad, hence why the computer stays untracked. and time on my 3ds for example falls under hobby time because it is productive to me personally!)

My screen time tracking on my phone has not given me data for the weekly average yet, but I know for a fact it’s an average of about 2 hours because I’ve used the tracker to write my final screen time every day and it’s all hovering around 2 hours.

So I’ve done REALLY well so far.

I have tried to do similar things before, but it’s been more strict and they never ended up clicking.

It always tends to be very all or nothing for me. When I set my mind to something either it clicks and I can do it instantly or it fails and I give up.

Like I’ve never been able to slowly wake up 30 minutes earlier each day, because with my mental and physical health I’m either doing bad enough to sleep 12 hours a day or good enough to wake up when I intend to.

For the past week I’ve been able to wake up at 5! It’s awesome!

It helps that now I have the motivation of needing to take my morning walk AT 5 am because of this horrible heat wave.

My morning walks are super important to me, it’s the only routine I’ve had the whole summer break even when violently depressed, and so the heat wave is not about to stop me from getting at least one short walk in hahaha.

I come back sweating before 6 am even hits but it’s worth it to me to uphold that routine !!!!

I think walking is very important to move your body and heal your mind. I always just feel better after a walk.

I was even taking multiple walks a day some days when I was in the trenches.

One day I was so depressed but also so anxious that I just felt this frantic energy in my chest I couldn’t get rid of so I took a walk in this terrible storm. My shoes were soaked for days omfg.

So the walks have truly been my lifeline, it allowed me to feel like I at least accomplished something that day even if for the rest of it I was basically rotting.

I know it’s problematic to always refer to your resting time as rotting but I tend to judge myself pretty easily for resting when I “should” be doing something so forgive me lol.

Oh! I never explained why this is all being framed as an experiment!

I decided to go with an experiment instead of something like setting hard rules and making a habit tracker because the framing of an experiment is so much more forgiving.

You do not “fail” an experiment, you simply gain data from whatever the outcome is!

It was very important not to judge myself for doing “good” or “bad” with my intended goal. Just to try !!!!

So I decided that from Thursday to Sunday I would try and lower my screen time and youtube time.

And it was an instant success! I got under half my regular screen time on the first day!

The experiment yielded such good results that I actually extended it out through this week!

So tomorrow is technically the last day of the experiment, a strong 9 days.

I don’t think I will continue to use the tracker after tomorrow unless I find myself reverting back to old habits when I am not physically recording my results.

As you can see, the tracker is set to be checked in with three times a day, so morning noon and night.

It has been helpful to actually track and record how much time I was spending on my hobbies, especially in comparison to my screen time.

It was so motivating seeing that I was finally spending hours on my hobbies, as someone who was spending absolutely no time on them all summer before this, save for some journaling here and there.

I also decided to track things like my mood and my pain to see if it correlated with my phone usage but, very luckily I will say, I have been doing consistently well ever since I started the experiment.

So I think I will print out some spare trackers to grab and use on a day I can feel myself slipping back down again.

Maybe I will start to use this tracker when I return to work to see how working affects my screen time and my mental health.

I already know the answer is that work negatively impacts my mental health pretty greatly, so that’s why I feel I may need the tracker again to motivate myself to keep going and keep getting good results.

Hell maybe I will actually keep using the tracker every day anyways just to gain a wealth of data as motivation to look back on when I do start struggling eventually.

Thanks for letting me think out loud at you about this lmfao.

Alongside this experiment, I have started something else incredibly cool and rewarding!!!!!

I have RETURNED to POETRY !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is very anticlimactic news to anyone who did not know me in my school aged years and knew how much I loved and valued writing.

But it’s big news to me !!!!!!!!

I was a HUGE writer ever since childhood. I loved writing fictional stories and poetry, it was all very cathartic and freeing to me.

I have been on hiatus for ELEVEN YEARS. I never wrote once I graduated because my depression was too severe and I just completely lost the ability to write.

So now, at 29, I have finally returned!!! Isn’t it so lovely now that you have context!!!!!!

And I’ve made a commitment!

I decided after writing three poems that I was going to commit to writing at least one poem a day.

I wanted to seriously commit to bettering my craft and becoming a good writer again.

Because, spoiler alert, I suck now. And that’s okay! It’s freeing to suck!

I’m starting over and that’s nothing to be ashamed of!

And so that’s not all, I made ANOTHER decision.

I was going to take these poems I have been writing and post one a day on an instagram account dedicated to my poetry!

That way we can see the chronological growth of my abilities.

I decided to be brave and vulnerable and share my journey with the world!!!!

This is huge for me as a complete introvert perfectionist.

I want no one to see me at less than my best. Until NOW !!!

I wanna show people it’s okay to be bad at something you are passionate about!

It’s okay if you don’t improve exponentially every day!

It’s okay to create some stinkers!

Because as long as every piece comes from the heart it is worth so much more than something you made just for the sake of it being perfect and without any flaws.

Everything is flawed! We are all flawed! That is a beautiful fact of life!

So I’m gonna post my shitty poetry out into the world one day at a time and I’m gonna be PROUD.

Be proud!!! Be loud!!!! Don’t let the world fool you into thinking you have to be good to enjoy something !!!!

You can show up, flaws and all, and still be valid !!!!

So, without further ado, welcome to my instagram, AngelsAndAsters!

I hope you come to enjoy or resonate with even one thing I have posted there.

I am on day 6 of posting, but have 13 poems currently written! Today’s will mark 14 once I write it.

I spent one day writing 5 poems total, I was locked the fuck in lmao.

and most days I write two instead of one, but writing one is acceptable as that is my only goal!

Well that is most of my life updates lately! I know both of them came from this past week but I truly have been doing miserably before this past Thursday.

I told my therapist I felt like the horse, Artax, from The Neverending Story in the swamp of sadness.

For those of you who have never seen it, the young hero has to cross the swamp of sadness with his horse to get to where he needs to be.

You can cross the swamp, but you will sink into the blackness if you succumb to the sadness of the swamp.

The horse eventually succumbs and stops moving. He is sinking slowly as his owner is screaming at him not to give up, to keep going, not to let the sadness defeat him.

And yet the horse does not budge. It is a very sad scene in the movie.

So I said I felt like that horse, lost in the sludge of the swamp of sadness with no idea how to get out.

It was a fitting comparison. The feeling of a strong black sludge overtaking you is exactly how I felt, enveloped by my own depression.

I didn’t know how I was ever going to get out.

Little did I know that a few weeks later I would be released, completely by surprise, one day on a morning walk.

I know that I will have to cross that swamp again. I know there will be times I sink back to the bottom.

But for now I am going to live in the moment and embrace how I feel.

I will live with endless gratitude for all the things I am blessed with !!!

Life is not perfect by any means, my psychiatrist actually recently pointed out how I am still stuck in a survival state due to my circumstances, but at least life finally feels worth living, even if only for a few weeks before I return to work.

Thank you so much for reading this, and I hope this will not be the last time you hear from me this year!

Till we meet again, luv u !!!!! <33333