I rarely watch TV these days. I’ll occasionally start a show on Netflix or Amazon Prime, but as often as not I’ll lose interest four or five episodes in and never go back to finish the series. I’ve talked about this with friends over the last couple of years, but I never really gave much thought as to the reason why. The best explanation I could ever come up with was that, with my anxiety, I’m easily overstimulated and so too much TV would actually cause my anxiety to become overwhelmed and skyrocket — and so I’d avoid watching TV as a result.
That explanation, though, has never felt quite right to me. It hasn’t ever felt complete, but I could never precisely put my finger on why. It’s never been a priority for me to find said explanation. After all, it’s just been a change in my habits over the last couple of years and a fairly trivial one in my mind, so I’ve never dedicated much mental processing time to analyzing the ‘why’ of this change.
Talking to one of my best friends yesterday about TV shows that I’ve yet to watch (but that I’ve heard are good), the rest of the explanation dropped down in my brain and clicked cleanly into place, completing the mechanism of this introspective insight.
There was a time when I consumed visual media at a prodigious rate. Every show with a sci-fi or fantasy element I could get my hands on I would download and binge watch for hours at a time. In my free time, during working hours as “background noise,” and even during time I should have spent with my family. This became my habit for years. It was a distraction. I was chronically depressed all the time and falling ever deeper into that black pit of despair. Watching TV and movies was an escape for me, a distraction from my misery and pain. As long as I was watching one of my shows, I could forget, for a little while, how miserable I felt.
This habit got me into trouble. Frequently. I would delay responsibilities at home to finish an episode (or three) of a show. At work, I justified it by telling myself that it actually helped me focus on my work — but my employers knew better. My work output actually continuously decreased over time, and this habit was brought up in more than employee review. Mentally, I just shrugged it off. I was fighting for survival, but I couldn’t find the words to explain this, not to myself let alone to my supervisors or my family. I just knew that somehow TV shows and movies were part of what was keeping me tethered to the earth. I simply lacked the personal insight and the words to explain this.
After I was hospitalized three years ago, my desire to watch TV underwent a dramatic shift. I slid from watching TV all the time to its polar opposite — watching TV so rarely that I think I went months without taking in a single show. Programs that I had watched faithfully for several years I suddenly had no interest in, and I fell further and further behind on what was happening with characters that had once been central to my life.
Initially, this was because of my anxiety. The change in medication that all but banished my depressed and fully exposed my panic disorder left me vulnerable to overstimulation. And so I avoided everything that caused my anxiety to spike. One of the few things that kept me sane through all this, ironically, was playing Destiny on my Xbox, and I could lose hours in the game while trying to keep my panic attacks at bay. But even that began to fall more to the side as time passed and I gained better control over my anxiety.
The revelation that clicked into place for me yesterday was so simple that I almost couldn’t believe I hadn’t realized it sooner. But as I said, I hadn’t given it much thought. But it exposed a fundamental shift in my mentality that was both basic and profound.
I’ve fought depression and anxiety for most of my adult life. I literally lost years of my life to TV and media consumption. That’s years of time I can’t ever get back. Over the last three years I’ve worked hard to grow and heal and become a better version of myself that doesn’t require crutches to continue moving forward. For years TV had become more than a crutch for me. It had become the very thing that kept me standing, kept me moving, and in some ways, kept me alive. Without realizing it I had started distancing myself from TV because it now represented a part of my life that was painful beyond imagining. It represented a version of myself that I hated. It represented all those lost years of time where I could have been doing things that were more meaningful and important to me. It represented regret and remorse and a thousand other kinds of pain. It’s very possible that it always will, to some extent.
That insight hit me less light a ton of bricks and more like someone turning on a light in my mind. Comprehension and understanding flowed through me as two disparate dots of my identity finally connected. This was the rest of the explanation that had been missing. And with this insight came a sense of relief. Solving puzzles are always like that. They can be troubling and stressful while you work on them, but once you find the solution, that sense of relief, that sense of completeness and accomplishment washes over you. That’s what I felt yesterday.
And in identifying the remainder of this answer to a question I hadn’t fully realized I’d had, I found that a door had opened — just a crack — that might allow me to one day enjoy TV again. When you identify the monsters and boogeymen lurking in your mind, you can begin to make peace with and banish them. As monsters go, this was a relatively small one, easily dispatched by a swift kick to the backside. But every monster banished is one less demanding resources to combat.
Will I ever go back to binge-watching TV? Maybe. Occasionally. But as a regular thing? Almost certainly not. In the last three years I’ve replaced my television addiction with other habits and hobbies that I find far more fulfilling and productive. I’m learning to live my life again, and on my own terms rather than on the terms imposed on me by my mental illness. And I far prefer it this way. My life has become more meaningful to me now. I can’t imagine ever wanting to give that up again to countless, meaningless hours consuming shows that add little, if anything, useful to my life.
I’m happy with my life as it is now. I’ve worked hard to get here. As far as I’m concerned, TV will always take a backseat from now on to other, more important things in my life. And that, I think, is the way it should be.
