If Iâm completely honest, the more I heal and the less time I spend in an actively dysregulated state, the harder it is to be online. It takes actual effort to scroll, itâs hard to explain but I just canât be here passively anymore. Iâll come here to post and respond to messages or things like that, but I canât scroll for very long bc it just feels weird, like hanging around a hospital after youâve recovered from a very long illness. Except the hospital didnât do much to help and oftentimes made you much worse, but thanks to the connections with a few fellow patients you were able to heal in spite of the hospital trying to keep you sick.
Anyway. Online spaces are tough for us when we live in fear bc we are in such dire need of connection but this medium will kill us if we have too much of it. It feels like drinking seawater when youâre dying of thirst alone and adrift in the middle of an ocean.
The internet, it iterates and iterates and iterates, it concentrates and percolates our fear bc itâs the input, and we consume the output, which is the fear, iterated many times. We come here because we have an inbuilt need to connect, even more so when fear dominates our lives, but we have to be careful, we have to balance it with connection in real life. We have to balance the parts with the whole, the brain with the body, the one dimensional with the multidimensional.
We need balance. When weâre unbalanced we tend to lean into the direction in which weâre unbalanced and thatâs how we get spirals. And when we find balance and are moving forward finally, itâs hard to lean into the imbalance.
The conscious mind, cognition, ego, any other name for it, fears the unknown above all else. We get awfully attached to our misery, because it is familiar to us. We make a home in it, we build a life in it, because the only thing more terrifying than all the horrors in our memories is the Unknown. And change is unknown. We resist it incredibly well. We identify with our misery, our trauma, we make it a part of our identity so it is safe in the blind spot of our critical thought. As long as we identify with our trauma, weâll never escape it. And I find that being online keeps me entrenched in it.
I also think, we do what we need to, and nothing happens until the moment it is possible for it to happen.
I learned so much from tumblr alone, so much about the healing process, so much that without it I wouldnât have made the progress that I have. In a way, it was necessary to be exposed to all the bad of the internet in order to get some of the good it offers. It was necessary to be struggling and stuck and mired in my own suffering, for a time. The trick, I think, is remaining conscious of it and never forgetting that there is more than this, this is just one stage and there is more after it, and at some point it will be time to move on. I think everyone learns this at exactly the moment they are capable and not a moment before. We have to be reminded to remember.
So I guess maybe this is a gentle reminder that this is just one step on the journey, and itâs okay to be here (metaphysically, whether tumblr itself or the internet in general or, simply, in a state of trauma identification) for as long as you need to, but do remember to listen for the whisper of the moment when you no longer need to be here, and heed its call. It will come from inside you, it will be so soft and small that itâll be easy to miss if you are surrounded by too much noise. But donât worry, it will always try again, it will always call back, until you answer.
Love to you.
