REELIFICATION

 – Anuska 

I was 16 when I got my first phone. From childhood, I felt as if having a mobile phone in my hand was the ultimate sign of liberation for me. Liberation from having to answer my parents about why I did not practice sums all evening, liberation from having to answer grandparents why I did not talk to an elderly person politely, liberation from being a ‘child’. Hence, when I got my new phone, I was ecstatic and felt as if I could do anything I wanted with it. But in 2019, the ‘reels’ and ‘shorts’ culture was not that strong. So, being an eleventh standard student studying science and in a strict household, being the only minor, I was not able to do everything I wanted with my phone. 

Cut to 2021, I was an adult at last and with the advent of COVID and Quarantine times, the vast culture of ‘reels’ and ‘shorts’ came up. It came up just like a whirlwind and consumed all my attention, and that truly felt like a liberation at that time. Suddenly, being an adult who just got out of the most stern institution of my life at that age, the School, I felt untouchable and unstoppable. With fewer and fewer books and the pressure of the syllabus on my hands before college starts, I started watching actual short-form content excessively. It was so excessive that whenever I was with my friends and siblings, I could name trendy songs used in those contents in a heartbeat. 

I was never an avid reader. I could not read books from childhood, and although the reason is something else but I had problems with my attention span forever, but I just made it ghastly extreme with my consumption of short-form content. I do not know even now what the reason for my short attention span is, but I know that I can function very well even if I have a very short attention span. I could even vouch that I could work better because of my short attention span, because I could think about a lot of things at once, which helped me to multitask and finish my assignments faster. But it was before I started consuming a large amount of short-form content. Now, I have an added problem of short attention span and the inability to multitask or even do any task with complete concentration. After destroying my attention span for about 3-4 years and, in turn, disturbing my mental health, I am now on a journey to heal my mind from the garbage I consumed in the past. I know that my ‘teenage dirtbag’ era has ended now, that I am at the end of my 22 years on this earth. My Instagram, Facebook and YouTube algorithms are highly in sync with my ideologies of caring and community-loving. Being a student of Anthropology, the content that I watch is highly political and left-leaning. Being a feminist, the contents that come up are disturbing because that is the situation of gender equality today. I love being informed about the things that are so disturbing yet so liberating to think about. Even those stimulating contents keep me shaken because of the rancid, unhealthy brain I've created for the last half-decade. 

So, now, although it looks bad and I am privileged to do so and feel extremely grateful, yet meek, I have stopped watching short-form content altogether. Although I love being stimulated in the right ( actually left) direction, I have stopped watching contents that highly shake me. I have stopped 'watch history’ settings for YouTube, which cuts recommendations in turn cutting off ‘shorts’ and have deleted Facebook and Instagram from my mobile phone. It's not that I don't keep watching news from other sources, but I am greatly in control of what I consume and how I consume it now. And I would like to keep it that way, at least till I undo the last 5 years of scratching my brain. 

The irony is that now I live alone in a completely different city, in a completely different state. No one is there to control me, to shout or scold me if I am glued to my phone. My peers are also a lot similar to me because that is what most of us are at this age. But I was so controlled by the device that I am in dire need to control it from consuming my life. 

I was reelified once and now am trying my best to non- reelify my life and live again so that I can become a person who can help others live their life with honesty, integrity and happiness.