Liosuelo

The Breaking Point: Eye Strain, Burnout, and Quitting the Internet

Now, at 36, it feels like I’ve spent 20 years overconsuming. Information, knowledge, and the voyeurism of other people’s lives. People I don’t actually know, have never met, but somehow feel familiar. I knew their profiles, or knew them through someone else on Facebook. Maybe they went to the same private school as someone I knew, or I saw them once in the background of a photo at a party, and suddenly I was obsessed with finding out what they were doing.

I remember this group of people who were friends with a guy I went to elementary school with. They all went to the United Nations school in New York City. They lived fast lives for teenagers. I would scroll through their Facebook and Twitter, watching them go to parties, dressing provocatively, moving through the world in a way that felt distant from me. I stopped checking on them in my twenties, but there were always others. People I found through friends of friends whose lives I continued to follow long after I had stepped away from Instagram. They were wealthier, thinner, more attractive, more educated. Watching them made me feel closer to beauty, to status, to something I thought I was missing. I checked their profiles obsessively, trying to understand their lives. It became a strange parasocial relationship, one that pulled me away from real-life connection and into observation.

At the same time, I had this insatiable need to fill my mind with information. I wasn’t just on social media. I was reading constantly. Articles, forums, message boards, niche websites. The Guardian, The New York Times, anything I could find. If I wasn’t working, I was online. And, if I’m honest, I preferred that to being with people. At my lowest moments, when I felt anxious or depressed, I turned to this. It became a habit, a way to cope. I consumed and consumed, filling my mind to the point of overflow so I didn’t have to feel what was underneath. It numbed me, but it also let me feel through other people.

I became fixated on the lives of sex workers and people with taboo lifestyles, or people in deeply difficult, often hopeless situations. Part of it was a pull toward social justice. I’ve always been drawn to darker stories. But I think it was also a way to process something internal. Seeing that other people were going through equally heavy things made my own feelings feel less isolating. Sexually, I was repressed for a long time before I left Christianity. I would look at people who expressed their sexuality openly, whether by choice or circumstance. Their lives became a way for me to understand sexuality and sexual health, often through chaos, pain, or moments of empowerment. But consuming those stories also weighed on me. Reading about trauma shaped how I saw the world. It created a heaviness, a kind of low-grade despair. At times it numbed me, but it also made me more sensitive, more reactive, more overwhelmed.

As someone who feels deeply and is constantly aware of my emotions, I started matching my inner state to what I consumed. I remember telling my boyfriend that when I felt sad, I would seek out other sad things to match that feeling. It became a loop that kept me stuck for a long time. I knew it had gone too far when I started getting wrist pain from being on my phone constantly. This was when I was in Thailand. That period intensified everything. My dad had just died, and I was on my phone all the time. That’s when I became obsessed with Caroline Calloway, watching her unravel, following every detail of her life. Around that same time, I found Lipstick Alley and spent hours on those message boards.

The internet also felt like a form of community, depending on where I was engaging. YouTube played a huge role. I was deeply immersed in the vegan and fruitarian world. People like Freelee the Banana Girl, Bonnie Rebecca, and Stephanie Y. I followed their lives closely. When Stephanie was cycling in Australia and documenting everything on her blog, I couldn’t look away. I was interested in health, and I eventually became vegan, but at the time it was more about watching people live extreme, visible lives. I was drawn to it in a way I couldn’t stop. By my early twenties, I started feeling depressed about myself. I felt like a loser for watching other people live lives I wanted but wasn’t creating for myself. That feeling peaked when I turned 30. I saw people who had started blogs or social platforms in their early twenties now becoming successful, connected, and accomplished. They had built something, and I hadn’t.

That’s when I thought maybe I should do this too. Maybe I want to be an influencer. Maybe I want to create online. But I could never quite do it in a way that felt right. Looking back, I had so many failed attempts at building something online, and eventually it started to create resentment. I felt like I was too late, like I had missed my window. I had spent years watching instead of creating. That belief put me in a dark place. It made me feel like I couldn’t exist as a creative without the internet, like success required participation in it. I’m still unraveling that now, even after stepping away for just a couple of weeks.

My first severe eye strain injury happened in London. I was stressed after an argument with my boyfriend and went into a dark living room, scrolling on my phone with the brightness too high. I didn’t stop. Something shifted that night. My eyes felt like they contracted intensely and then suddenly released, but my vision went blurry. It felt like I had pushed them too far. The next day, I couldn’t look at screens. Everything felt harsh and bright. That’s when I bought blue light glasses and started adjusting my habits, but I didn’t fully change them.

About six months later, it happened again in New York. I was stressed, on my phone too much, and woke up with a floater. I went to a doctor and was told everything looked fine. Around that time, I had started working seriously on my first book. A couple of months later, I went to South Africa to focus on writing. I was writing for hours each day without proper breaks, then spending even more time online. It was productive but stressful. I strained my eyes again, noticed more floaters, and panicked. I took a short break, improved slightly, and then went back to my habits.

When we moved to Tulsa, I understood my patterns better, but stress kept pulling me back. I was trying to build a presence online as a writer, creating content while also over-consuming. I was constantly on Reddit, Lipstick Alley, and the Daily Mail. Eventually, the strain came back. One night, after pushing through fatigue, I woke up the next morning with significantly more floaters. My eyes were extremely sensitive, and it felt like something had changed in a lasting way.

That period was difficult. I felt responsible but tried to push through because I had just started a new job. When I finally looked into it, it scared me. My boyfriend told me I needed a real break. I stopped using screens for a weekend, then longer. Slowly, my eyes improved, but they were still sensitive. I realized it wasn’t just blue light. It was the intensity and the way I focused. Writing felt physical, almost exhausting. I took a full week off everything. No phone, no reading, no writing. Just audio, walking, rest. It helped.

My mind started to clear. I stayed off most platforms. No Reddit, no message boards, no constant news. My thoughts felt quieter. One thing I noticed was how much the internet conditioned me to seek immediate answers. To look everything up instantly. It removed any sense of discovery. It also changed how we interact. In conversations, there’s always a pull to verify in real time, which creates distance.

Looking back, it’s hard to accept how much time I spent in that cycle. It took a physical breaking point to step away. I still have floaters. They’ve improved, but they’re there. A reminder. I feel cautious now about screens and how easily I could fall back into old patterns. I’m also questioning what it means to be a writer in this environment. So much of writing feels tied to being online, but I’m trying to imagine something different. Writing by hand. Connecting in person. Finding community outside of a screen.

This is the beginning of figuring that out. Building a life with less dependence on the internet. Learning how to sit with boredom again. Letting my mind be quieter. It feels unfamiliar, but necessary. I remember what it felt like before all of this, when I could get lost in something without a screen. I want to find my way back to that.