This morning while getting ready for therapy, I gave up my fight against winter and put on thick, wool socks and climbing boots. I refuse to have cold feet, I thought. Well, never let it be said that the universe doesn’t have a sense of humor, since it turned out to be a rather sunny day. Now therapy is over, I’m at the library, and I just took off my long-sleeved shirt in favor of the t-shirt underneath. My feet are absolutely sweating, my armpits are moist (yes, I said moist), and I’m about to start fanning myself like a Mississippi debutante in August.

But. At least I’m not freezing.

Last night I slept for shit. Exhausted, I tried going to bed early, around ten, but woke up a couple hours later and couldn’t fall back asleep until four. I don’t know how people deal with insomnia on a regular basis. God bless you. What I did was watch one documentary and three TED talks and scroll through Facebook until my thumb nearly fell off. As you know, social media is mostly cat memes, clickbait, and political bitching. (And your cute children, of course.) Sometimes I think it’s more stressful than helpful, more bad news than good. So long as I’m blogging, I don’t know that I could completely give up social media, but I’m considering adopting “stop scrolling” as my New Year’s resolution.

God knows it would save me a lot of time.

Currently I’m listening to one of my favorite songs, Africa by Toto (the band, not the dog in Wizard of Oz). There’s a lyric that says, “It’s gonna take a lot to drag me away from you,” and that’s what the idea of scaling back from Facebook feels like. If I’m going to call it what it is, it’s an addiction, something I can’t put down, something that–at least in its current quantity–takes more than it gives. More than once my therapist and I have discussed some online drama–something someone else said or did. You know how you see a picture of two people together and your mind runs wild. This is the stress I’m talking about it. Well, my therapist says, “Forty years ago, you didn’t have to deal with the drama of other people’s lives in this way. Maybe you heard some of the gossip at the local coffee shop, but it wasn’t on-demand, constantly at your fingertips.”

Even as it sit here, I keep wanting to pick up my phone, change tabs on my laptop and start mindlessly scanning my news feed. I guess it’s a way to check out, to leave the world I’m currently in and enter endless others. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with this, but there’s also nothing inherently wrong with where I am right here, right now. The sun is shining, other people are working at their laptops, and I’m listening to 80s music. What more could a girl ask for? Still, I’m a little nervous–maybe it’s the lack of sleep, maybe it’s the fact that therapy often leaves me feeling raw. Either way, the nervousness makes me want to distract myself from it rather than actually listen to it or simply let it run its course.

I’m sure we all try to distract ourselves in one way or the other. We scroll through Facebook, we walk to the refrigerator or turn on the radio, we smoke a cigarette. Hell, if dealing with your feelings were easy, everybody would do it. In the documentary I watched last night, which was about a group of prisoners who participated in an intense meditation program, one of the guys said that you can spend your whole life distracting yourself, but sooner or later you’re left looking at what’s inside.

Having spent a lot of time around meditation and self-help material, I used to think the goal was to get rid of all the uncomfortable, icky feelings. I’d think, If I can just be spiritual enough, I won’t have to feel nervous ever again (phew). Well, first–Good fucking luck, Marcus. Second, I’ve changed my mind about this. More and more, I believe one of the points of spiritual living is self-acceptance, and that means being able to welcome whatever arises in my external and internal life with open arms, or at least curiosity. Why do I feel this way? What can this teach me? What am I really running away from? (If the answer is me, we have a problem.) Naturally, these questions aren’t always easy to answer. Like putting on a pair of wool socks, getting to know yourself is often something you have to warm up to. But this is worth doing, I think, since the alternative looks like endless scrolling, coming to know the ever-changing temperatures of the world outside but never finding the steady source of heat within.