I am addicted to the internet.If I allow myself, I could spend hours—even days— riding the waves of internet surfing. It is something that I really struggle with and I don’t know how to stop it either.
I’m not looking at inappropriate things. I’m not chatting with people of the opposite sex and I’m not even reading inappropriate blogs. I’m just surfing; reading blogs, commenting on blogs and looking up information. Googling things....
Oh how I love Google.
I find myself thinking about a question I have and I immediately have to go to the computer to look up the answer. Then I surf from one link to the next and suddenly it has been three hours.
Three hours of my life I will never get back.
Three hours lost looking at useless information when I could have been interacting with my children.
Three hours isn’t a large amount of time in the eternal scheme of things—but it is a lot of time when your children are young and being shaped by your presence in their lives. Or lack thereof.
I surf the internet to escape.
I’m lonely.
I really have no friends where I live and I have found some amazing connections through blogging and reading MMB. I can spend hours surfing through MMB and reading about everyone else’s lives—all the while I am hiding from mine.
I can play games on Facebook and peek into peoples’ lives in my ward and see all the fun things they are doing with each other. Without me.
How many people are like me, I wonder?
I spend time on Twitter. I even have it set up for my phone so that I won’t miss a single tweet. I have mini conversations with people and it makes me feel like we are friends. We are friends, aren’t we? Even if we only chat about the silly things our kids are doing. Or what we made for dinner last night. Those silly meaningless conversations mean something to me.
But, I know that I spend way too much time on the internet. My back hurts sometimes when I get up from my chair. It feels like I am permanently bent in this sitting position because I have been here so long. When I see my husband’s car coming down the road, I immediately erase the history on the computer. Not because I have been doing anything wrong and surfing anywhere inappropriate, but because I don’t want him to see that I was on the computer for the last 4 hours straight… taking breaks now and again to get the kids their treats and change the movies for them.
I have a problem and I don’t know how to stop.
I feel withdrawals when I can’t check my email or be on the internet. I have everything set up to come into my email—all the tweets, Facebook updates and blog comments—and if I can’t check it, I might miss something important. When in reality what I am really missing out on are the chances to bond with my children and husband.
My friends live inside my computer and I am so consumed with reading about everyone else’s lives that I am forgetting to actually LIVE my life.
I want to change, I just don’t know how without going totally and completely insane.
*image via Google
