i want to be bored

i want this summer to feel like childhood again

today finally felt like summer. it seems like spring hasn’t even come this year though so it feels weird. up until last week it rained and i wore a jacket or a sweater on top of my outfit but this afternoon i went to the lake and i lay down on the grass and i thought that’s what all the kids who just had their last day of school must feel like. i liked school but i loved being home more. during the long summers me and my sister were either at home playing or at our grandparents’ house pretending to be working in an office. we spent all day surrounded by papers and fake documents and we would email or call each other from one room to another since we were colleagues and our grandpa was our boss. for our mid afternoon snack we would share a lemon and we ate one half each, with a spoon. we loved that, we waited all year for that moment.

i’m determined to spend this summer offline. everyone around me knows i hate being on my phone or on social media (even if i only really use one, it’s already enough for me). since i deleted most apps two weeks ago i’ve felt so good. i didn’t realise how much time they took from me and how bad they were for me and my creativity. it feels like i turned off a background noise that was constantly playing in my brain and now i’m left with silence and peace. now i can hear the birds chirping, the leaves rustling and my mom singing quietly in the kitchen. i can hear my own thoughts again, untainted by random pieces of information i didn’t even choose to read. i had at least three new ideas for posts and i’ve been writing a lot, anywhere. i feel so inspired.

the thing is, i don’t care anymore. i don’t care about what you eat in a day and i certainly don’t care about whatever you’re trying to sell me. learning about skincare was more fun when i was 16 and i did my own research, now there are people everywhere telling me to wear sunscreen and prevent wrinkles and i’m so tired. i hate what social media have done to people. i had breakfast with a friend a while ago and at one point she took out her phone and finished editing a vlog-style video of her and other friends and then she posted it on instagram, all while i was talking to her. she didn’t even seem to be listening to me. i thought apps were supposed to be a distraction to take our minds off things and to have a break. now it seems like it’s the other way round. when has the online world replaced real life? and when did i become the distraction from it?

youtube has always been my favourite platform and up until a few years ago i had never watched a real tv series because videos and vlogs were all i watched. i followed channels religiously but i had to unsubscribe from a lot of them because no one felt authentic anymore. i’ve always been at odds with trends and with whatever everyone seemed to be doing. it was my only real act of rebellion, being otherwise an obedient girl. i never cared if others thought me odd because nonconforming made sense to me. i felt different so i had to look different too. sure, i often feel inspired by things that i see online and that maybe are trendy in some way but i’m talking about when i constantly see the same things over and over and when people become all clones of each other, like for example reading the same romance books with the same annotations and buying the same makeup and i don’t want to be a part of that.

i miss being bored. this summer i want to be bored. i want to lie on the couch not knowing what to do next. to sit by the river and just watch the water flows by, to read on my balcony and eat fruit and drink hot cups of tea even if it’s 35 degrees because i still crave it every afternoon. i want long form content i intentionally choose to consume and to listen to full albums from the first to the last track and to spend whole days reading big chunky books like i did at fourteen years old. i haven’t felt that in a while. i want this summer to feel like childhood again.