For the last two weeks I have been in self-imposed internet exile while I worked on finishing my first complete draft of my dissertation proposal. I set my personal email address to its vacation setting, letting everyone know that I would not be checking email very much and only be responding to “high priority” emails when I did. If it was really important, I figured people can just call me. I took away my email notification system so I would not know constantly whether I had a new email. I said goodbye to my Facebook page. I set up a website blocking application on my browser to keep me from going on my favorite websites and blogs – a bad habit when I am trying to get writing done.

And I discovered something amazing. My life is so much better when I am not doing most of these things. I did not miss Facebook. I did not miss checking my email all the time. I never realized how little control I usually have over my impulses when I am online. And suddenly, when I took these things away, I was so much more focused on what I was doing. I didn’t have all this extra information and stimulus flowing into my mind. Apparently, I don’t have to know everything that is going on with everyone all the time.

There is something about making room for creation. When I have stimulus coming in from the outside all the time, it means that I don’t have to do much internally. I don’t have to figure out how to fill the blank page. If I have my Ipod on all the time, I don’t have to fill the quiet. But once I was in my apartment, with nothing to read, nothing to listen to, no one to talk to, the sink was empty of dishes, and the bed was made, finally, no matter how painful, things had to come from inside me.

The initial stirrings of my brain were overwhelming. It was not a pretty, nice, calm process. There was a classroom full of voices shouting to be heard over the din. Particularly the one voice that says that everything sucks and none of the other voices have good ideas and why can’t we just watch tv instead – that voice was loudest. My dissertation “therapist” (no, I am not kidding – school provides us crazy grad students with a handful of session with counselors to keep us sane) told me to give that special voice a shape and a name so that I could confront it and put it away just while I was writing. I decided it was a monkey and the bad monkey had to go sit in the corner just while I was writing. Why that techniques works, I don’t know, but it actually did. I did manage to write for two weeks straight. I didn’t lose my mind. It was something.

Back to the beginning of my story, I now feel like I have a small window to change my habits. To gain control over the technologies that have filled the blank spaces in my life. Though I find having access to information and news all the time to be a comfort, I think it is much better to have blank canvases to fill.