Week 4: Total Media Purge
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Hello, my lovely MsBrowns family.
It’s NotesOnDawn here, and welcome back to my little corner of our 'AllAboutBooks' world.
I need to start this post with a confession, and it feels like the right, safe place to do it. As you know, I am on my 12-week journey with Julia Cameron’s The Artist's Way. And this week, I’ve been documenting my progress through Week 4. The theme for this week is "Recovering a Sense of Integrity."
And the central, non-negotiable task for this week?
Reading Deprivation.
When I say "reading deprivation," I mean it in the most absolute, terrifying sense. No newspapers, no social media articles, no television, no films... and, as my stomach dropped to the floor, "no books." [01:59]
I am not exaggerating when I tell you I felt a cold shock. I remember flicking to the page, reading the assignment, and just... nothing. "I was like what do you mean," I said to myself [02:16]. "I can go without social media for a week... but what do you mean I can't read for a week?" [02:26]
Of all the things this book has asked of me, this felt the most personal. The most cruel. Here I am, on a website dedicated to All About Books, writing as a book lover, for a community of book lovers, and I am about to tell you about the week I gave up the one thing that feels like air to us.
It was one of the hardest, and most profoundly revealing, weeks of my life.
Amazon UK - The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron
The "Normal" Noise: My Relationship With Media
Before this, if you'd asked me about my media consumption, I would have said I was "like the average person." [02:53] I have an "average about 4 hours per day on my phone," [03:14] which, horrifying as it is to say aloud, feels standard. I love to "enjoy watching YouTube when I eat my meals." [03:00] I "read about a book per week." [03:07] And, of course, I have the TV shows I love to wind down with after work [03:00].
My main "problem," in my own head, was social media [03:48]. Like everyone else, I get "grabbed into it" [03:48] and can "endlessly scroll." [03:55] I approached this week thinking that would be the main struggle. Cutting off my phone, disconnecting from the endless scroll, would be the big boss battle.
So, I prepped. I decided to "start it on the weekend," [04:43] thinking I could ease into it. And honestly? The "plot twist" [04:08] is that "deleting social media was probably the easiest thing out this whole entire week." [04:08]
The weekend was, in fact, "really really easy." [05:34] I spent all of Saturday outside in the "early May sort of sunshine" [04:47]. I went to the Botanical Gardens, I did a lot of journaling, and I sat "with my for[thoughts] and enjoying this new scenery." [04:54] In the evening, I went to a friend's house [05:06]. On Sunday, I journalled outside again [05:19]. I was so busy living and so occupied that I didn't feel the pull. It helped that I "wasn't really reading a book at that moment," [05:57] so the temptation wasn't staring at me from my bedside table.
I went to bed on Sunday night feeling pretty smug. This was easy. I was fine.
And then, Monday came.
Monday: The Day From Hell
The workday itself was fine. I work from home three days a week [06:04], so I woke up, did my routine, and got to work. "It was all good." [06:24]
Then, "Monday lunchtime" hit [06:24].
My flat, which is usually my sanctuary, suddenly felt like a cage. I stood in my kitchen, my one-hour break stretching out before me like a desert, and I thought, "what the fuck am I going to do for my hour lunch?" [06:24]
This, right here, was when the "itch... really started to kick in." [06:40] I managed to force myself out for a walk [06:46], but the entire time, a "sense of dread [was] overcoming me throughout the day when I was thinking about... my evening." [06:55]
And what was this great, existential dread? What was this profound terror I was feeling?
It was... dinner.
"The dread really was coming from the fact that I was telling myself I can't watch TV or I can't read a book or I can't scroll on YouTube while I eat my dinner." [07:10]
I cannot express to you how "generally horrible" [07:17] this feeling was. My brain was in full-on panic mode. "At that point in my brain I was like well if I can't do any of this what the fuck am I going to do?" [07:24] I was "generally... stressing the fuck out." [07:27] I'd be at my desk trying to work, and this panicked thought would just loop: "oh my God I'm not going to be able to watch TV with dinner." [07:32] "I'm just going to have to sit out and look at the window." [07:40]
It "really shocked me." [07:47] It wasn't my phone. It wasn't "connection." It wasn't even the books, not yet.
It was the "brain numbing activity." [07:47] It was the ritual of finishing work and immediately turning "on something to watch so you can sort of shut down." [07:53]
"Not being able to consume something while I consumed food was the Pinnacle of stress for the whole week for me." [08:17] I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but "I couldn't be an iPad kid was my biggest challenge." [08:26]
That night was... hard. I made it. "I managed to get through Monday night without watching any TV." [08:00] I substituted the craving with "a lovely jigsaw puzzle," [09:10] which I found "really make[s] my brain hyper focus." [09:15] And for my meals? "I ended up spending most of the week just eating looking out the window." [09:33]
And in that vast, empty, silent space I had been dreading so much... something else started to creep in.
In Silence, Solace? The Wednesday Breakthrough
By the time Wednesday rolled around—Day 4—I was over the hump of the "iPad kid" withdrawal. I'd survived my silent meals. The world hadn't ended. But now I was faced with a new problem: time. So much of it.
On my lunch break, I felt a familiar restlessness. "Okay I don't really want to go on another walk... I love nature but I'm a bit sick of it." [09:46]
And then, a new thought. A strange one. The Artist's Way talks a lot about "your relationship with faith," [09:50] a concept that I, as someone "very cynical about religion," [10:02] have always struggled with. In the past, I’ve "probably been very... unfair to people who are religious." [10:02] It's something I’ve been actively trying to rework.
And with all the usual noise stripped away, all the "brain numbing" inputs gone, this other, quieter voice had room to speak.
"I was like I'm really seeking I really want to go sit in like a holy space and just like spend my lunch there." [10:25]
So, I did.
I walked down to a church near my flat, "literally... just down the road." [10:38] I was "really nervous going" [10:54]. I'm not religious. I didn't know the rules. "I wasn't sure if you could just rock up want to church." [10:54]
(You can, by the way. [11:00])
I opened the heavy door and stepped inside. "And it was like complete silence." [11:05]
There was "literally no one inside the building." [11:00] I just sat in a pew and did some journaling. I wasn't journaling about God, but about "how the building itself makes me feel." [11:11]
And it made me feel... full. As a writer, this is the kind of 'well-filling' I’m always chasing, but never find on a screen.
"I think within those spaces you can really feel this like sort of trace of History this trace of human emotion or shared emotion this trace of like hopes and dreams and prayers." [11:24, 11:31]
You can feel it. The weight of it. The stories. "I really love being in a holy space like a church because it's very inspiring for me as a writer." [11:37] "It really sparks of creativity," [11:44] this feeling of "so many people have sat here and had so many different like problems and issues that they have come to his face to sort of be in silence be at peace with." [11:44]
(And, as I noted in my journal, "it helps that the architecture is sexy as well." [11:54])
I left that church "very at peace." [12:05] And I realised the most surprising thing of all.
With all this new-found time, I thought "I would be more inclined to do things like write... do scrapbooking do some art." [12:27] But "I actually found the opposite." [12:27]
"I actually was like actually I don't want to do anything." [12:33] "I just want to sit with myself and sit with my thoughts." [12:33]
This was the breakthrough. The point of the deprivation wasn't to replace one 'unhealthy' input (TV) with a 'healthy' output (writing). The point was to stop. To create a vacuum. To get so bored, so quiet, so "under-stimulated" that I had no choice but to finally listen to what was underneath.
The Dawn Chorus and The Final Lesson
I finished the week by going "back to my parents house" [12:43] for a camping trip with my dad and sister [12:50]. It was the perfect coda. A literal, physical removal from all signals. "I really enjoyed just like being out in the open away from the sort of daily activities." [13:12]
The next morning, I "woke up and had the dawn chorus which was beautiful." [13:28] As I sat there, listening to the world wake up, I realised that this is the only media we're designed to consume. This is the original input.
So, what’s the big takeaway?
"It was generally such a good week." [13:43] And... "it was extremely hard." [13:55]
But what I learned is that "I don't think that's the point" [14:06] to "break your habits" [15:10] or to suddenly "put like boundaries on how much I consume." [14:01]
The point is "to figure out where your thoughts are." [14:11] The point is awareness.
This week, in its brutal, silent entirety, didn't "fix" me. I'm not going to stop watching TV. I am certainly not going to stop reading. But it made me aware. "I can definitely see that when I'm over stimulated... I'm more inclined to come back and just shut down." [14:47, 14:59] And "shutting down for me is consuming media." [15:06]
"And there's nothing wrong with that." [15:06]
But now I know. I'm aware of the choice. This challenge, in its harshness, "really made me consider aspects I've kind of been ignoring." [15:20] It forced me to sit with the big, uncomfortable questions. "Like questions about my faith," [15:26] and, most importantly for me, "questions about why I don't do certain Hobbies... like my writing... every day." [15:26, 15:34]
It seems the ultimate creative block isn't a lack of ideas. It's an excess of noise.
As book lovers, we fill our wells with the words of others. And that is a beautiful, essential thing. But this week taught me that every so often, we must have the courage to endure the silence. To stop reading, just for a little while, so we can finally hear what our own inner artist has been trying to whisper to us all along.
Thank you for letting me share this with you. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a lot of reading to catch up on.
With so much warmth,
NotesOnDawn