I don’t want to handle my life the way I’ve been handling it so far. I don’t want to numb myself to the point where I don’t believe that the problems I’ve been running away from don’t even exist. I was watching a show before I started typing this. I don’t find the show interesting, but that’s not the point. The point is that it does its job. I turn into a vegetable when I immerse myself into what I consume. I adopt the struggles of the characters as my own, and that momentarily makes me forget that I am my own person and I have struggles of my own. I don’t know if forgetting myself is a complete and fair characterization of what consuming media all these years has done to me. I also suspect that I partly owe my ability to quickly detach from myself and my life to all the movies, books, and shows I have consumed.
Really though, who or what do I have to escape from? I couldn’t give you a clear straight answer. I’ve been preoccupied with the act of running away by numbing myself through fictional immersion, so I haven’t exactly had the chance to sit down with myself and associate words or pictures with who or what I seem unwilling to confront. The negative self-talk I’ve been engaging in for a while now surely does not help me get the answers I’m looking for. I don’t feel good when I spend all day watching tv shows I couldn’t care less about. The kind of shows I’m referring to are the ones that are so bad that I can’t even peel my eyes away. By now, it has become a habit I automatically engage in, but I don’t wish to keep walking down this road.
Let’s get to what I know when I watch a tv show. I know that starting a new journey of binge watching nine seasons of nothing feels good. By the end of it though, I don’t feel so good. I feel like I’ve wasted hours of my life that I will never get back. I feel like some shows could’ve been directed better because the ending was so obvious that one could say it was practically spoon fed to viewers. Getting rid of garbage media is not what I’m getting at here. Just because it doesn’t challenge me doesn’t mean that it serves no purpose and therefore should not exist. In fact, I think the purpose in the kind of shows I’ve been consuming is simply that it has no purpose. I’m the kind of person who seeks to derive meaning from everything, so the fact that I’ve chosen to consume meaningless media is a way I’ve found to turn my brain off and not think about… well, anything. It’s been so long since I last challenged myself, or turned my brain on so to speak. But I believe in myself. I can get myself out of this place if I want to. I want to.
This habit of turning my brain off changed the way I perform another habit. I used to be able to eat in silence. Nowadays, I find myself reaching for my laptop when it’s time to eat. I scroll through my YouTube feed for five minutes to find the perfect video to watch. Alongside my stomach, my eyes and mind need to consume something. Just as I’ve allowed myself to consume junk food, I also consume junk media. I feel a bit disappointed in myself for letting my complacency get this far. But now is not the time to feel sad. Now is the time to figure out exactly what’s wrong and what I can do to change. What’s wrong is that I feel groggy and weak and tired, both physically and mentally. It doesn’t come as a surprise to me that I feel this way. I do partly believe in the “you are what you consume” saying. The problem with feeling like garbage on fire is that I can’t immediately get to the bottom of things. Hence the reason why I throw my hands up when asked about what I’m escaping from.
To be perfectly honest, there is one thing I could point my finger at, one reason why things are the way that they are. In a deep, underground level in my brain that is only accessible to me, there is one great wound that fundamentally changed the way I see the world. I believe I am well underway to the path of healing that wound as much as I humanly can. You know what they say, everything starts with acknowledging that there’s a problem, right? I think my abnormal consumption of literal mind numbing media has something to do with it. I can get rid of this habit that has become a problem. I have the willpower to get to a better place, alhamdulilah. Or at least that’s the story I’m willing to convince myself, that I have the power to change. That’s one cool thing about being human: besides the constraints of language, space and time, I get to control the narrative I feed myself. I could be a winner or a loser. I just have to assume one or the other, and then I automatically manifest as such. That’s why I could never be defeated, not even by my own self.
Is “healing” even the correct term to label the solution to my problem of consuming way too much media? Should I even be referring to that one great wound as a wound? Is it even a wound? What makes a wound a wound? I could just keep asking myself questions, but I know myself well enough to say that if I do so, I would be evading this uncomfortable sit down with myself. I tend to bombard myself with questions to keep myself occupied from facing uncomfortable truths. For the moment, I’ll satisfy myself with this answer: just like everyone else, I’m a product of my time, and I’ve become accustomed to people tossing the term “unhealed trauma” around. At the end of the day, I can’t escape the body that I live in, and I don’t want to end my story earlier than it should. So, what should I do? Besides saying “yeah Umulkhair, we have a problem,” what can I do to help myself? I think I should reconnect with my purpose. I believe the reason why I am here is to remember the Most Merciful. Anything that doesn’t bring me closer to my purpose is making my job more difficult.
The fog is starting to clear, and I can confidently admit that I’m ashamed of myself for not doing my job as well as I should be doing it. Is this really what it comes down to? That I’m too much of a perfectionist that I can only see myself doing a perfect job or no job? Wow, Perfectionism is one nasty dog. Yeah, I think it makes sense that that’s why I started distracting myself from my life. I wasn’t proud of how I was doing my job. I didn’t feel like an excellent servant of the Most Merciful to the point where I gave up. I have arrived at a point in my journey on the Straight Path where I am exhausted and am not doing my job at all. I’m just laying there, on the side of the road.
I completely stopped praying, practicing dhikr, and contemplating the signs in the Quran in the last few months. I even stopped writing. I find it embarrassing that I’m the one putting the roadblocks and thorns on the path I know I was created to tread. It certainly doesn’t help that I have an invisible enemy that is constantly whispering in my ears. I know I can vanquish this enemy. I don’t want to give the shaytan more power than he has. Puffing him up would be both unnecessary and untrue. He’s not strong at all. He’s weak. The shaytan can’t win. My lord assures me so in His book, the book of guidance, the book that contains no doubt or contradiction. Yes, I disconnected myself from my Lord and spent that time as… well, intellectually speaking, catatonic. But as long as I’m alive, I can change. The good news is: I don’t have to start reconnecting with my Lord in an excellent manner. I just take one small sincere step towards Him. September is over. It’s gone. October has arrived. I think its time I get up, dust myself, and continue treading the path.
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