soos_mite_ah

8/3/2025 Screentime: 2 hours 55 min Tiktok: 45 min I hit up against my limit and decided to stop then and there. This wasn't sporadic. This happened between 11am to 1pm. Maps: 40 min I went to a coffee shop like 20 min away from my home and so I needed the GPS to navigate there and back. Messages: 32 min Talked to a few people and responded to some messages Instagram: 15 min This was very sporadic. From 10 am to 11am, I spent 2 min on the app. From 11am to 12pm it was 2 min. From 1pm to 2pm it was 1 min. From 3pm to 4pm it was 1 min. From 5pm to 6pm it was 9 min. I guess since the algorithm isn't tailored to me, I don't get sucked into it in the way that TikTok sucks me in and that's why my use is more sporadic. Still, I feel like a crackhead when I keep checking like this even if I'm not spending an extend period of time on the app. Safari: 7 min Had a couple of random google searches.

Body Image Update It's been more than 5 months since the surgery. I still pretty good about the results though I'm adjusting to my current proportions. I feel like I'm like 85% satisfied with my body but the last 15% has been flaring up. I remember right after the surgery, I went through a phase where I felt like I looked as though I had a BBL because I thought my ass looke disproportionate to the rest of my body. That feeling has since subsided. Now, I'm crashing out over my boobs. I was really freaking out about it like a month / month and half ago because I'm essentially built like an airpod and I feel like my chest is freakishly large. i got my bra professionally fitted and I was also told that I'm a 30L. I guess it's good that I found a bra that fits and that I look less like an airpod but an L cup?!?!! That sounds sooo fake. Granted most people are wearing the wrong bra size so our perception of what is considered big and small is very skewed but hearing that I'm an L is still something that I'm trying to wrap my head around without feeling like a fetish or freak of nature. Shopping for clothes is still a struggle. Nothing fits my chest and I feel disproportionate. Sometimes I think about how I should have gotten a breast reduction when I got the tummy tuck. But on the brightside, though shopping is still frustrating, at least I no longer walk out of stores hating myself and feeling grossed out like I did before. There are also small thing that I have nitpicked about my body in the past that is coming back up. I have a little back fat, not enough for rolls but enough to where I notice and extra amount of squish when I put on a bra or anything form fitting. I always felt like my arms were kind of big. And my thighs touch. Usually, these things were mildly annoying but I guess it's more so has been in the fore front as I'm adjusting to my new proportions. It's easy to hyperfixate on the little things once the big insecurity has been taken care of. I feel like month 1 was the most neutral month where I was physically working on healing from the surgery itself and I was in the *what have I done to my body* phase. Like I felt good in the sense that I had a sense of what the results were going to be like but I was still in the trust the process phase (I would rate this a 4/10). Month 2 was when some of the results were coming in and I was feeling my best body image wise (I would rate this a 9/10). Month 3 had me feeling weird about my ass and weird about changing beauty standards but decent over all (7/10). Month 4 had me feeling more neutral and adjusted to my proportions (6/10). Month 5 has me feeling weird about my chest (3/10). Now, I would say I'm feeling more like a 6/10. Overall, right now as I'm moving from the 5 month mark to the 6 month mark , I feel good about my body but I feel like my brain is still adjusting to a few things. I might not be 100% satified with my body but I do feel like I'm over all more proportionate and that I feel much better than how I felt about myself presurgery. I'm also glad that these fluctuations are also not affecting my relationship with food with feels huge to me. I do feel like my relationship with food has been a bit off lately because of my overall mental health and how sometimes when I'm depressed I lose my appetite and I lose my energy to work out. And as a result of being out of my routine, there is a part of me that is afraid I'm going to gain all the weight back from the surgery and wind up looking weird as hell. I've also been dealing with some weird bloating due to things like food poisoning and some times eating meals with too much sodium and that messes with my head a little as I have been trying to adjust to my proportions. In the end of the day, despite my body image fluctuating like this, even when i felt like a 3/10, I still felt like I made the right decision to get the surgery done throughout all of this and I still feel better than presurgery. And I think that's what matters.

8/2/2025 Screentime: 3 hours 17 min Youtube: 1 hour 38 min watched a few video essays Safari: 1 hour 12 min I don't think this is an accurate number. It says that I spent an hour on Safari from 9 pm-10pm. I checked a couple things online but I wasn't on there the entire hour. I think I just had the app open. Plus, if this were the case, my screentime would add up to more than the 3 hours and 17 min shown after taking the other apps to consideration. Instagram: 37 min I checked Instagram from 1am to 2am in the morning for 7 min, from 5pm -6pm for 10 min, from 8pm -9pm for 10 min, and from 9pm to 10pm for another 10 min. Hexa Sort: 26 min I was playing this in the evening while listening to a video essay. Tiktok: 21 min I spent this time from 10-12pm. Thoughts: My screentime felt kind of low today. Usually that is the case if I have a packed or social day but I didn't do jack shit today. I spent a lot of time just relaxing tbh and I think it's a good sign that I'm able to relax without zoning out in front of a screen. I was also playing around with the settings on my phone and I saw that there is a way to disable your phone usuage between certain hours of the day. This is with the exception of a couple of communication apps, the clock app, and maps. I'm going to try that out by disabling my phone usage from 10 pm to 9 am in the morning.

Y'all have such creative imaginations, much more creative than my own, when it comes to my user name

This cracked me up lmaoooo soos_mite_ah is actually a really bad misprounciation of my actual name

8/01/2025 Screentime: 4 hours 30 min Youtube: 1 hour 49 min Pretty much all music Instagram: 59 min Very sporadic: 7am - 8am : 6 min 8am- 9am: 18 min (calls were slow at work and I had nothing better to do lol) 11 am - 12 pm: 10 min (another period of slowness) 12 pm -1pm : 1 min 1pm - 2pm: 2 min 5pm - 6pm: 2 min 7pm - 8 pm: 1 min 8pm - 9pm: 10 min (I was at my uncle's house bored lol) I need to learn how to better deal with boredom lol. Messages: 30 min sent a couple audio messages to a friend going through something Hexa Sort: 25 min played like 15 min in the afternoon to decompress from my day and like 10 min in the morning Tiktok: 18 min checked it in the morning for like 6 min and spent like 10 min on it in the afternoon. Ngl, I do get weirded out when I notice that I'm on social media at like 7 am in the morning whenever I do these logs and I actually write things out and bring my habits to light. Photos: 15 min scrolled through my camera roll and deleted some things.

7/31/2025 Screentime: 3 hours 13 min Youtube: 2 hours 27 min Most of this was music, about an hour of this was poltical content on Youtube. Hexa Sort: 28 min I played this for like 7 minutes during a boring meeting at work and for like 21 minutes while I was watching Youtube videos. Instagram: 27 min spent like 12 minutes on it in the morning and like 15 minutes on it after work Tiktok: 9 min I just spent this time at like 12:01 am before I tried to go to sleep last night. So technically this falls under today because of the time but in my mind, this is for yesterday lol. Thoughts: I think my phone usage was pretty tame today. I think part of that is because I has some family social stuff going on and because work generally kept me busy.

I loved this video. I may or may not do a whole post about this.

My general assessment is that yes, the U.S. is moving into Stage Green, but it's going through a VERY messy ego backlash in the process. I think a lot of the MAHA stuff is a good example of this. Yes it's Green but because it lacks the healthy foundation of Orange scientific reasoning, it's not a solid and sustainable form of Green. Similarly, I think we saw something in the pre-WW2 era before Orange became the center of gravity for the U.S. Eugenics is Orange but it's a pretty corrupt version of Orange because yes, it takes the scientific reasoning of evolution, but it also incorporates a lot of stage Blue pseudoscience that is rooted in things like racial superiority. Eugenics is a corrupt form of Orange in the same way that the holistic/ crunchy / woo woo kind of MAHA health is a corrupt form of Green. I wrote about this along with other examples of how this ego backlash is manifesting in a journal entry a while back if you're interested in checking it out:

7/30/2025 Screentime: 3 hours 58 min Youtube: 1 hour 42 min Mostly music Instagram: 52 min I was sporadically checking this throughout the day but I will say a solid 36 of those minutes was recently between 9 and 11 pm. I think I want to cut down on the sporadic usage going forward and be a bit more intentional if I'm going to block off time. I think my mentality when I find myself looking at this and Tiktok sporadically is like I scroll for 2 minutes, then I'm like *oh, I'm not supposed to be doing this, let me find other ways to regulate myself*, and then I close out of the app. I think this is just part of the process of me decreasing my social media usage but it's another metric that I can be mindful of. Tiktok: 14 min Again, sporadic usage. Hexa Sort: 25 min I was playing this as I was on the phone with my boyfriend. Safari: 16 min I just viewed the forum briefly in the morning while I was at work.

7/29/2025 Screentime: 3 hours 52 min Youtube: 2 hours 21 min Mostly music mixed in with some mindless scrolling. The mindless scrolling mainly happened between 12-1am when I couldn't sleep. Clock: 50 min I used the timer a few times throughout the day: TikTok: 40 min consisted of some mindless scrolling between 12-1am for like 30 min and then I also checked TikTok a couple times today Instagram: 36 min This was pretty sporadic throughout the day. Messages: 27 min checked a few texts pretty sporadically Thoughts: I feel like today felt like reset of sorts compared to the last couple weeks. I looked at my stats for the last two weeks and I would say that my averages weren't too far off from my usual. But I had a couple days where my screentime was really outrageous. I think the days that it felt the most outrageous were a couple of days where I spent 1.5-2.5 hours on TikTok and an hour on Instagram. Other days, my phone usage wasn't too bad in terms of total screentime but I did spend like an hour each on TikTok and Instagram. That didn't feel great either. Gonna be honest, it was a response to stress from work and my social life. I need to learn how to deal with that better. I will admit, as I was viewing my stats for 7/29/2025, I was nervous about how bad the last two weeks were. I was expecting it to be worse, but I can't say it was great either. Anyways, I'm getting back on track.

Me if a guy says he's in love with me after 1 month of dating

Abuse These last couple weeks has been a lot... I've been dealing with a lot of shenanigans in my social life and work has a little more stressful than usual. Gonna be honest, I haven't been doing well. My sleep schedule is a mess. My diet is all over the place and I frequently skip meals. I have been doom scrolling a lot over the last week or so. And I haven't gotten back into working out. While I do feel alright mentally (i.e. I'm not depressed, anxious, dealing with grief/trauma etc.), I do feel exhausted, over stimulated, and kind of all over the place. And I guess I want to brain dump on here as to why that is so. So as I was writing this, I realized that I was having articulating myself so I'm inserting this paragraph as a brief overview of the social dynamics at play. X is my boyfriend. FH is my bestfriend. MR is my good friend who got engaged. RW is my engaged friend's sister who got married on 7/25 (let's call her husband EW because gross lol). FH is good friends with MR and RW. X grew up with MR and RW. I'm not good friends with RW but I did hang out with her a few times when she would tag along with her sister. X and I got invited to RW's wedding early in June 2025. Neither of us knew she was even in a relationship but we didn't think much of it since we didn't really hang out with her much and because when we did hang out with her, it's not like we were interrogating her about her dating life. It just didn't come up in the few times that we interacted over the last couple years. We were just happy that we were going to a wedding to turn up. Then 2 weeks before the wedding, I asked FH something along the lines of *oh btw, what do you know about the couple getting married?* FH said she didn't know shit. I responded with how she and RW have been pretty close so I would think that she would have known more so that felt kind of strange. Before we had an opportunity to rub two braincells together, MR announces that she's engaged. Here's the thing with the engagement, NONE OF US KNEW SHE WAS EVEN IN A RELATIONSHIP BEFORE. So X, FH, and I started crashing tf out because this is abnormal of MR to hide, we have no idea how long she's been with this guy, and we know that MR's life has been a dumpster fire recently so she might not be in the right state of mind right now (she left an abusive roommate situation, her last relationship ended in a restraining order, Elon Musk swept in and took away her job and ability to pay for higher education, she's struggling to find a job, and more). That mixed with the mysterious circumstances of RW's wedding, there was a lot of suspicious and concerning things in the air. Like, is MR holding on to dear life with a guy who isn't good for her? What is the time line of this whole thing? Why has she been hiding this? Are the sisters enabling each other and egging on bad life decisions? WTF is going on??!?!! Anyways, after crashing out for 48 hours, we decided to regroup and coordinate exactly how we were going to have this conversation with MR to figure out what exactly is going on before freaking out more so that we know how to better address the situation. We framed this conversation (prompted by MR mind you since she was excited to share the news) as a *juicy gossip spill sesh* instead of a *intervention, interrogation, and psychoanalysis meeting.* We wanted to frame this as us trying to get to know what's going on without judgement and create a situation where she feels comfortable sharing. And of course, we want her to feel like we're on her side and that we're supportive (even if we don't agree with her life choices). That conversation went reasonably well. I will say, after that conversation, I went from being concerned and having alarms ringing around my head to being skeptically optimistic. I do feel like she's in the right state of mind and that she's not holding on to this man for stability / overly romanticizing this situation. I still feel a bit skeptical with the pace of this because it feel unnatural for me personally but it sounds like it's coming from a healthy place for her (she has known this guy for rougly a year and she's gonna get married at like September/ October of this year). 80 mph is reasonable on a highway but it's ridiculous on a neighborhood road. Sure, it's fast, but I feel like it's still on the faster end of normal. As for why she hasn't said anything over the past year, it's genuinely because she has been stressed with a lot of things and those have been the topic of discussion rather than her love life. She wasn't trying to hide anything. If anything, we were some of the first people to know about the news. The situation with her sister RW has been significantly worse though. FH tried to get into contact with RW just to hang out (even before all of the wedding stuff started to happen) but RW has been weirdly distant for the past few months. FH started asking some very basic questions about the guy and RW was being weirdly cryptic. Like, FH asked what the guy was like and EW responded with "he's not from here" AND NOTHING ELSE. Mind you, RW, MR, and EW are all Arab and FH and I are both South Asian. So FH and I were like WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN? Like, is the guy not from Texas? Is he from abroad? Is this a green card marriage? Were they arranged? DO WE NEED TO PULL UP!?!? Also, RW told FH that she was single back in March 2025. So, if RW is telling the truth, that means that she and EW have been together for like 6 months or less prior to getting married and planning out a wedding. At first, I suspected of RW of lying because she lied about something similar in the past. So, FH, X , and I were like *ok, we can't do shit now because the wedding is in a week, let's just pull up and figure out what's going on.* The wedding was on Saturday. The wedding was pretty westernized by Middle Eastern standards. I can't say that either family seemed particularly religious/ conservative or like they were pressuring RW and EW based on their attitudes. I talked to the EW's mom (since I didn't get a chance to talk to RW or EW) and I do think that the family is like upper middle class, but they aren't like rich or anything. It's unlikely that this is a green card marriage (thought that wouldn't be impossible, I'd give the chance as 70/30). But then, there were the couple's vows....... EW sounded like a typical lover bomber. He saved RW's name as Wife on his phone after the second date. They said I love you like month in. And apparently, he moved to Texas from California, lost his job 2 months in, and then he found another job and soon after met RW. After talking to his mom, EW grew up in Dubai (the family is ethnically Egyptian), then completed his bachelors and MBA in California, and moved to Texas 8 months ago. So, he moved to Texas 8 months ago, lost his job 6 months ago, and then some where along the way met EW, fell in love, announced the wedding like a month ago, and then here we are in the present day. Translation: This relationship has been a thing for 5 months before the wedding. AND THAT'S BEING GENEROUS. RW sounded delusional and traumatized. She talked a lot about her difficult family background (financially and emotionally), how this man is saving her from her difficult life, and how she "has been in her masculine energy for her whole life and now she can finally be soft and feminine." Like... homegirl is literally talking about Sprinkle Sprinkle talking points in HER WEDDING VOWS. I get having a difficult life and finding a partner who complements you well to the extent of which it can make up for some wounds you have, but.. that shouldn't be front and center of your overall relationship with a person because that's receipe for a trauma bond right there. FH and I were giving each other looks during the wedding vows and then we had to stop so we don't accidentally start making faces. We were both like *what the actual fuck were we listening to.* In addition to the vows, they also lowkey avoided us three at the wedding. Which was WEIRD. Honestly, I think it's because we would have asked questions and have said something. We also got to talk to one of MR's friends who was a real estate agent. Apparently EW and RW already bought a house together prior to the wedding (AND THEY PROBABLY HAVEN'T EVEN KNOWN EACH OTHER FOR 5 MONTHS). To me, this looks like EW is pushing bigger and bigger commiments onto the relationship to where RW would feel pressured to stay. They've done literally everything except have kids. I tried to talk to more of RW's friends but most of the people on her side were either people who were kind of distant to her or more so friends with MR like us three. And listen, I'm not trying to judge EW's social life. I get that you can be close to some people in certain phases of your life but not in others and that not every season in your life involves having robust social circle, but the fact that FH is probably the closest person to her and FH didn't know about any of this, that's concerning. All of this felt textbook in terms of what happens when people come from financially / emotionally difficult background and then that causes them to easily fall for things that sound waay too good to be true, like a narcissist showering you with love and affection to get you easily hooked on to them, and them distancing you from your friends and family. Things like this can easily devolve into abuse and DV. This is a very dangerous situation. Thoughout all of this, I have been a sounding board for FH. I'm like an acquaintence at best when it comes to RW but FH is actually friends with her. She told me that RW has had a history of rushing into relationships, even to the point where she had a failed engagement at 19 (she's 23 almost 24 now and EW is like 26/27). That failed engagement was a dumpster fire to the point where RW said that if she ever got engaged, she was never going to tell anyone until wedding because of evil eye. LIKE BFFR. GIRL NO ONE GAVE YOU EVIL EYE, THE MAN WAS JUST EVIL! She also romanticized being a stay at home wife and marrying rich to the point where she basically followed the Sprinkle Sprinkle content like it was the bible. And aparrently, RW does have a tendency to ghost when she's "going through things" which usually has to do with her dating people for like 3-4 months here and there. So all of this is very much giving a male centered woman who will drop her friends the moment she meets a guy and who has bad internet dating advice brain rot. Like, this apparently a recurring pattern for her and I'm afraid that the only way she's gonna learn is through a messy divorce or DV. And all of this sounds terrifying. We like to think that we're better than our parent's generation but like.... are we though? We like to think that we're breaking generational curses, but what if we're not? Or worse, what if we're making new curses? And as someone who values friendship as a very key component in life, not only is life transitions as you grow up difficult to navigate, but in situations like this, it's down right scary. I've lost friends over the last 3 ish years due to abusive workplaces, abusive partners, and other difficult life situations. I hope these people find healing and more stable life situations and maybe they'll come back around and we'll be able to mend things down the road. I just.. I don't want to lose more people especially to awful, heartbreaking situations. I've also been reading up on how to handle things when you're a friend to someone in an abusive relationship. I'm trying to be tactful and be the reasonable one amongst my friends so that we don't pour gasoline into these situations. I feel like dealing with someone in an abusive relationship is much like dealing with a drug addict. You want to be supportive, but you don't want to enable them. At the same time, you want to hold them accountable but you have to be careful on how you say things so that this person doesn't essentially relapse. And with drug addiction, depending on how bad it is and how long they have been using, as much as you want them to go cold turkey, if they do that, the withdrawals could be worse than the addiction itself and can even kill them if it's not handled by a professional. Similarly, it can take on average 7 times for a domestic violence survior to finally leave their abuser. And leaving is the most dangerous time and often the time when people get killed. So as a result, a lot of people stay in these situations because it's safer to do so than leaving. And it's like both of these things can get drawn out and REALLY fuck up your life. And it hurts me knowing that that there is someone in my circle who is close to being in a situation like this. I guess, I'm just sitting with the heaviness of it all.

I liked this video and how it discusses virtue mirroring. I didn't realize I was lowkey doing this but I did notice that sometimes I don't like shows because the characters annoy me or do not reflect my views. And in an effort of creating a more open mind, I have been trying to open up my tastes to include that kind of media to appreciate it for what it is rather than trying to make it into what I want.

Hey again I was reading your journal and I wanted to say that a lot of the stuff you have talked about in the past week did resonate with me and what I dealt with when I was trying to get my eating back on track. The bloating is rough. It doesn't feel great and the distortion in your body image can fuck you up. At the same time, sometimes it's part of the process. If in the past you eliminated or heavily restricted certain foods for a while, re-introducing them can cause your stomach to freak out because it doesn't have the enzymes to digest those foods like it used to. Nevertheless, if you keep eating, your stomach will adjust accordingly and you won't start bloating the moment you have a slice of bread lol. And yeah.. volume eating can mess with your natural hunger cues. Sometimes I feel like it's a healtheir version of binging because it has the same mechanism of eating until you're stuffed (or eat a very large amount of food in one sitting) even if you don't really like or crave the food in question rather than being in tuned with your body's natural cues. But once you move away from it and start trusting things that have a higher caloric density (and also has a higher nutrient density) that mechanism can fall away. But as usual, things like this can take time and are almost never fun in the beginning. I just wanted to let you know that you're not alone and what you're experiencing in this journal is all normal and that there is an end in sight where things that are difficult stop being so. It's not an easy task to learn to trust your self, your body, and eating whatever sounds nice in a world where diet culture goes as far to say that if you're hungry you should just drink water because you're not actually hungry unless you want to volume eat spinach. There is a lot of mindsets around food that can muddy your attitude and behavior around food and that takes longer to unpack than the basic nutritional stuff. This sucks right now, but it isn't permanent. I wish you luck on your journey and I have faith in you.