IG gave me my account back. Apparently I was flagged as spam. Even though I rarely make a post or comment. But okay.
So now I ask myself what moving with intention on social media is for me. Because today I sat in therapy and told my therapist the very stupid story of the deactivation of my IG and how it made me contemplate things.
Where my energy was going. How I was carry around the imprint of 10+ years of my past. How I had realized that the human brain is capable of letting go of past traumas if it is not constantly reminded and if we aren't constantly curating our digital footprints, it has the ability to send constant reminders to our brains about things that maybe we wouldn't think about as often without those subtle reminders.
It is like that, how we let people into our lives via social media that maybe we would have kept out... the old coworkers or classmates who no longer reasonate with us. Relationships that wouldn't survive otherwise, even if they are just a random laughing reaction on a post every 7 months relationship.
I remember my mom bringing up my elementary school best friend and how maybe it could be cool if I found her on social media and got back in touch with her. My last memories of this girl were not necessarily warm fuzzy ones. And also? We were friends from kindergarten to 4th grade. 4 years of my life. As a very young child. I straight up told my mom it was too silly for me to entertain at this stage of my life. Just because we can possibly find anyone we have ever encountered on social media, doesn't mean we should.
I realized I don't have to keep carrying the past with me. Stupidly enough, it was the IG account loss that really drilled that point home. Who would have thought? I've been in therapy for like 3.5 years trying to get my brain to understand that and all it needed was meta to temporarily pull the plug on me.
I don't need to constantly be reminded that my husband almost died. I don't need to constantly be reminded that I had a scary pregnancy.
I don't need to constantly be reminded that I had a horrible collection of injuries to my body that left me hopeless for far too long.
I don't need to constantly be reminded what steps I had to take in my journey towards healing. I lived it, I know.
I don't need to constantly be reminded that some people died. I live with the loss each day.
And I don't need the constant reminders that this world is fucked. Thus I need to curate my feeds to turn off the impossible bullshit I can't change and focus on the things that I can change. I don't need the rage bait. And I don't need the actual rage.
I've struggled with this since I grew up enough to realize how screwed up this world is. That space between being informed and just feeling awful because... what can we do? And that's the thing, if it isn't action, what good is just the emotion of rage? Depression? Hopelessness? Our brain gives us these things so we feel compelled to act. Social media gives us these emotions towards nothing that can be acted upon.
Facebook is easy for me, because I don't follow a lot of pages or anything and I'm just not a facebook person.
My neighbor has a solution I like in theory, and that is to delete the apps and just redownload them 1x a week to check in... and then delete them and stay off the shit the rest of the week. I think that might be worth a try.
I'm culling my following list massively... which... I've heard you gotta do slowly or else the moderating bots might ban you again because they think you are a bot (good lord meta you fucking suck).
I'm getting rid of the news pages, have decided I will get my news from a dedicated source that isn't attached to social media. Like my news consumption will be intentional... not.... here's a picture of a flower, a cat, there's a country getting bombed, here's a garden, here's some dumb shit Trump said. It fucks with your brain to consume it in that way. I don't think my head will ever be right after watching a genocide unfold on on my phone.
I think I'm going to use that thing on my phone, that sets an amount of time to use an app daily and that is that.
I am going to routinely ask myself... what can I be doing instead of social media if the urge to go on social media strikes. I deeply want to use my life for things that bring me joy, not killing time staring at my phone just because it's something i got used to doing.
I was trying to explain everything to my therapist today and when I was done she was like "damn you're making me want to go and delete my IG" but now that I've seen this impact of the energy of a digital footprint, I can't unsee it.
And I unsee myself.... and see myself at the same time. Untethered from a story that I have long been building and telling myself. A story that needed to be coherent for an imaginary audience. It all needed to make sense. And for who? Me? I don't know. And yet it always makes sense in the most imperfect ways.
I finally feel unblended from the traumatic shit life has thrown at me for the first time in a way that i can really appreciate it. Which is amazing because this time last year I was still very much in the thick of it.
I am and always have been a whole person with complex feelings about a whole lot of things. I have also come to realize that that just by being a whole person I am and always have been enough. But I didn't always know that. More importantly, I have never held that as truth in my life until now. Instead I was always looking to be enough. To be good enough. To be enough for my mom, my dad, my sister, my brother, my teachers, my spouse, my kid, my employers, anyone who would ever hold space with me ever. I've lived my entire life feeling too little for the people in it. Always.
I am very much at the midpoint of my life. Not having a crisis but for the very first time, asking who am I. Not, what do these people want from me and how can I give it to them... but what do I want and how can I get it for myself
