Where to now, St. Peter?

Tonight marks the end of two weeks of abstinence from my TV addiction. Maybe I should feel happy and celebratory about that, but ... I seem to be at a plateau with my addiction, and I want to be farther along, and I'm frustrated and depressed.

What I've done so far is very, very good. My abstinence feels stable. I still have the occasional urge to turn on the TV, mostly when I'm low and lonely, but overall I don't think about it much. I have huge chunks of time back for other things. And I no longer have the flood of stories, characters, images, and advertisements -- all crafted towards the goal of selling, selling, selling -- gushing through my head. I'm not being programmed anymore. That's all great!

But somehow I was expecting more. I'm abstinent, but I'm not free or serene. The initial burst of energy that I got right after I turned the TV off has settled down. My energy is still better overall than it was before the turnoff, but instead of staying high, it's once again following the familiar rhythms of my chronic fatigue. The line on the energy graph still rises and falls, but at a higher level overall. So that's good too, but ... I was hoping for more. And without the living presence of the TV, my living room has a ghost-town feel. The set itself remains, mute and blind, gazing at me with its 27-inch-diagonal eye. The ghosts of TV past are still there, and I haven't yet exorcised them. I've yet to turn the living room back into a room for living.

My head knew that turning off the TV, in itself, wouldn't be a magic bullet. But apparently my gut was expecting a magic bullet, and now here I am disappointed and depressed. Note to gut: expectations are premeditated resentments.

Turning off the TV may have been the easy part, 'cause now I have to start changing my life, and myself, to fill the hole where TV used to be. I have to take constructive steps to heal the things I was medicating with TV. I have to move beyond abstinence toward true sobriety and serenity.

So ... some thoughts about what I need to work on:

• Improve my social life. This is my biggest need, the one that my TV addiction seems mostly to be there to medicate. It's also the hardest one to address. I'm lonely and isolated; I'm able to get out of my home so seldom that it's hard to build any kind of regular social group. I think changing this will require some major life changes. I live in a suburban area that I don't like, and I'd rather live closer to the center of town where there are more people and I'm closer to the places I want to go, but I doubt that I could afford it. I'm going to start looking anyway. I don't like the city I'm in, either; I moved here to be close to my children, and I've committed to staying here until my youngest is done with college, which will be another three years. After that I plan to return to where I lived before, which I love, and whose climate is much better for my health and energy. I'm also thinking about shared living arrangements instead of living in my own place -- a housemate, or several housemates, or some kind of co-op.
  
• Achieve more of what I want to do in this life, and be more satisfied with what I can do. Also not a small matter. One of the attractions of TV for me -- especially dramas, which is most of what I watch -- is watching people do hard work, face tough situations, and achieve good things. That's what I want to be doing, and my greatly diminished abilities are at least as frustrating as my social isolation, if not more so.
  
• Make my living room less TV-centric. Maybe put the TV into a cabinet with a door that closes, or a fabric hanging at the top that drops down to cover the TV when not in use. Maybe exchange my rather large TV for a smaller one. Maybe move my hundreds of videotapes and DVDs (45 shelf-feet worth; I measured) somewhere else. Or put them in the cabinet with the TV so that the doors or hanging can conceal them too. Make the living room more inviting with better lighting and decorations that I like.
  
• Stronger steps, maybe. Pack up the tapes and DVDs and put them in storage. Get rid of some of them. Get rid of all of them. Get rid of one or both VCRs, or the DVD player, or all three. Have my cable company turn off the premium-level package -- an extra 40 channels -- that I discovered 18 months ago that I'm receiving but not paying for. Have them turn off the basic 13-channel package that I am paying for. Get rid of -- gulp -- the TV. Not ready to do any of those things yet, but ... they're possibilities.
  
• Invest more time in my spiritual life, which I've been neglecting the last few weeks. I consider this blog to be a big part of that. But I also need to get to more meetings, spend more time in prayer and meditation, and keep working my other recovery program.
  
• Last, but certainly not least, start working the 12 Steps as they apply to my TV addiction. As far as I know, there are no 12 Steps for TV addiction yet, but adapting the 12 Steps of AA is easy enough. And since no one else (that I know of) is working the 12 Steps to recover from TV addiction, I'll need help from people in my other 12-Step groups. That shouldn't be a big problem.
  

Well. That should be enough to keep me off the streets for awhile.