Unplugged

As much by laziness as by design, my family had no television when I was a kid. Sometime while I was in diapers, the tube broke down and the folks never replaced it. Along with mountains of toys, open access to woods and the playmates with whom to wreak havoc, we had record players in the house and a library of LPs containing everything from Chopin to Meatloaf. Despite this abundace, I had a sneaking suspicion I was missing chunks of critical experience. I registered the absence of the television by way of comparison. Friends sang cartoon theme songs at school and I diligently absorbed them. Whenever we could, my sister and I would hole up in friends' houses to gobble down episoses of Kidd Video and Speed Racer.

On the occasional weekend, my dad would bring an old black-and-white about the size of a shoebox home from his office. We clamored around this ersatz Prometheus to ogle in slack-jawed amazement until he snuck the thing away again.

When I was ten years old, Gramma bought us a real, honest-to-God boob tube. Color and everything. So began my dysfunctional love affair with visual media.

Like many kids with working parents, TV was my companion in the recovery hours between the emotional mosh-pit of middle school and the domestic familiarity of family dinnertime. For all the reasons people watch, I watched. To escape, to be entertained, to take a load off, to fill up the house with noise. I watched too much -- even as a bull-headed teenager, I was aware it was too much -- and had to rely on my parents to set the limits I could not.

When I left home at 17, I moved into an apartment firmly put my foot down: no TV. For the next ten years, I lived without one, except for the occasional, surreal summer home when I slipped into that washed-out vortex of over-consumption. Back then, my folks lived on seven acres of land abutting a forested mountainside in Vermont. Their closest neighbors were blackberry bushes, two babbling brooks, and perhaps a community of wood fairies. What did I do with my down time? Holed up on the couch with a pint of Ben and Jerry's watching game shows.

I knew better, of course. I had read Marie Winn's The Plug-In Drug. I understood that while television itself is simply a medium, and while it can be the conduit of edifying content, it has an addictive (narcotic?) effect which makes it hard to use responsibly. I desperately wanted to be A Person Who Does Not Watch Television. As a result, when I came anywhere near one, I developed whole lists of negotiations with myself about how much I would allow, and under what circumstances, and as a reward for what sort of behavior.

It has all been very exhausting.

In the eight years Tee and I have been together, TV has been a battle. Tee doesn't seem to think watching for hours on end is much of a problem. I have wanted to concede this point -- it's his life, after all -- but I hate having the thing in the house. It becomes too central. So many activities are available to us in this big, fat world. We can sing a song, make out on the couch, go identify a tree, paint a wall, host a dance party. We can just sit around and gaze at the sky. If visual media took its proper place in the scheme of things, we would watch about as often as we engage in so many other things. Once or twice a month, perhaps? In my experience, as soon as the television is introduced into the vocabulary of domestic life, it becomes a primary language. Other tongues grow rusty with disuse.

Add this to one more cause for panic about having to move back in with the folks.

The parental units have very comfortable viewing digs. A high-def flat screen in the living room offers up a thousand channels of dizzying possibility. Another box in the basement provides a nonviolent resolution to conflicting tastes. How in the world was I going to move my life in a better direction with so many opportunities for distraction? Their spare rooms have been a port in the storm (one generously offered), so I tensed my jaw in preparation for an inner battle with my own pull towards the idiot box.

Without noticing it unfolding, a curious change has taken place. Eight months have passed since we moved in. And I have watched maybe six hours during that time. Six hours total. The pull is simply gone.

What I didn't realize is that during two decades of relentless slef-flagellation and negotiation, I was still engaging with the television. Even when it was off, even when it was not it my house, I was attending to it. Like an ex-lover turned stalker hanging back in the shadows, its uncomfortably compelling presence kept me on high alert. By proclaiming, "I am not the kind of person who watches TV!" I was only re-establishing the intensity of the allure.

Reading Kenneth Gergen a lifetime ago, I began to consider that naming a problem or a diagnosis actually cements that diagnosis as reality. Each of us is in the process of framing and building our sense of what is real and who we are through our thoughts, language, and behaviors. Conceive of oneself as a productive or lazy, balanced or crazy, and watch the structure snap into place.

In the radical act of choosing a different life than the one I was living, I have inadvertently climbed up out of the deep grooves of patterned behavior. Not in every way, mind you. I still overeat when I am fretting and far too often, I speak before my censors have a chance to shut me up. But I walk every day in this new, exposed skin, and sometimes the intensity of lived experience is more than I can bear. Gazing at my fellow metro commuters, as tired as they seem, satisfies my hunger for color and story. A patch of ice, a lunchtime walk, a brief conversation. I lift my eyes, and while I may be gazing at the same street in the same neighborhood day after day, it is still a rare and precious place. This moment, without equal. Connection? Rest? A giggle? A narrative? Sure, television can offer all these things. But life itself does it so much better.

Okay, so yes, I am gushing. But you know what? Somehow, that specter back there in the buzzing, bluish light of the alleyway is no longer a concern to me. He seems a pitiful and dull companion. I guess by taking on the task of crafting my own joy, I stopped being secretly in love with him. I sigh and smile at myself. What did I ever see in that guy?

Now, when conversations about shows and movies swirl around me, I don't have much to add. No one seems to care. The fact that I don't watch much television is about as peripheral a part of my makeup as the fact that I don't play guitar or tinker with engines. On rare occasions, I might skirt the edges of these activities. I have no strong feelings about them one way or the other, and it is strange to notice television does not hook my attention anymore. I am much more compelled by the things I am doing than the things I am not. By beginning to construct a life resonant with the woman I really am, the protracted battles resolve themselves.

I guess all that wrangling with an unwelcome compulsion was missing one simple trick: if you simply turn yourself in the direction you want to move, the plug just falls out on its own.