When I spilled tea on my laptop, it was a blessing in disguise.

So, in the beginning of September 2023, something tragic happened. I was sitting on my couch, clocked into my remote internship, when I reached for my tea on the coffee table next to me. When I raised the cup to my mouth to take a sip of the liquid, I just missed my mouth completely and ended up spilling it all over the keyboard of my laptop.

I immediately powered it down, wiped it off, then let it sit upside down for a day, then booked an appointment with Micro Center to ship it off to get checked for damage. Thankfully, there was no damage, but I was without my laptop for the entire week, which meant I had to learn to improvise or else I would drown in my work and responsibilities.

I was limited to the computers at school to get my work done and my mother’s computer, which is a desktop that sits stationary in our living room.

But because this happened, my screen time went down so much. I was reading multiple books throughout the days, and then I ended up watching a ton of movies, too.

It was so relaxing that I decided to continue this newfound habit of unplugging and enjoying what the world had to offer—as someone who grew up with technology, it was a very foreign feeling, but a welcomed one as well.

Here are some of the major changes I’ve been making since then.

Only Sundays are dedicated to watching YouTube videos.

I had a major problem with YouTube videos before I went on this little self-care journey. I would fill my free time and breaks with watching random Youtubers I was subscribed to or looking up broad content to try and find more people to watch.

It was becoming a major issue because of how I was basically watching these videos to fill time and escape from reality. I also began to feel like this kind of content forces you to feel like you’re lacking something in your own life, and some of these videos lose their authenticity and feel like television when the YouTuber has a random cut to an ad.

So what I ended up doing is making an entire playlist to dump videos into when I when I feel like watching them, then controlling myself to wait until Sundays.

By the time I get around to watching them, I come to the realization that at least half of these videos I have no interest in and end up not watching anyways, which leads me to wasting my time a little less.

I’d rather be mindful about the kind of consumption I’m doing, which this has helped create a discipline towards in one aspect of my life.

I started exercising more.

For the longest time I didn’t have a desk, which meant I was laying horizontal on my bed and working most of the time like this. And as you probably know, this is absolutely horrible for my health. So when I started having to use my mother’s desktop for remote work, I ended up untangling myself from the laptop system and actually took breaks to move my body more.

I wrote a blog post on this, but basically even during my lunch breaks at the Smithsonian I was basically pulling out our family yoga mat and doing some stretches and yoga to try and get my body moving.

Basically, I ended up trying to get myself together during this time in order to prioritize my health.

While I love working from home and end up wanting to do this forever, I think that working from home can be really terrible for my body, which leads my free time to becoming more me-focused than trying to divert my attention elsewhere.

I’ve had more time to reflect.

Lately, despite being a content writer and marketer, I’ve had some time to sit down and think about what I want to do with my life since there hasn’t been a ton of noise to try and cut through this time.

I’m in my second to last semester of graduate school, which means I’ve had to try and come to terms with the fact I need to find a big girl job soon, which means I need to get myself together if I want to do this kind of work.

I also realized that I want to be self-employed in the future, which I’ve been taking the necessary steps to try and plan a way to make this more feasible in the next ten years.

But along with this comes with the reading more. I love to learn more about the world, and books are one of the best ways to do so.

And by reading some academic books in this mix, I’ve also gotten way ahead with my schoolwork and research, leading me to ultimately become happier with the kind of perspectives and ways of looking at the world I’m becoming more familiar with throughout my exploration journey.

All of this is to say that because I’ve been logging off, I’ve had time to experiment and clarify the path I’m trying to go down.

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