The hardest thing about sharing online for me….
Is also the most freeing.
The hardest thing about sharing online for me….
I thought about it this week.
What’s the hardest part about sharing online for me?
I’ve been sharing online since when I discovered Myspace and Facebook way back when we were so savage as to rate our Top Friends and then shuffle them around if we’d had a disagreement.
But I started really growing an audience 13 years ago.
Some say that online expression is the best shadow work you’ll ever do and I believe it.
Allowing yourself to be seen, truly seen by people in your own real life, can be a feat on its own. Some struggle with intimacy, vulnerability, safety.
But being seen by tens of thousands of strangers who all claim to ‘know you’?
I’m not sure we were ever designed for this insane dynamic.
As a species, we’ve had to adapt to it— the unnaturalness of having enormous amounts of people hold an opinion about you, without ever having had a conversation with you in their life.
I know this is true for celebrities, but look how many of them either have no social media, or go absolutely insane with a televised meltdown. Fame is not healthy for most. Here we are— thousands if not millions of regular Jo-blows are experiencing a fame that can be thrilling at first but incredibly challenging once the excitement wears off.
Fame or not, having a public audience takes guts. Only those who have one, really know this.
For some, it really is as easy as ‘posting and ghosting’, but for most of us it’s not.
Even after we exit the comments section and throw the phone into the drawer, we’re still there mentally.
Some of the strongest and most outspoken women I know personally, have recently decided to completely tap out from talking on ANYTHING other than their own work, because they were at breaking points, mentally.
Contrary to what the internet mob thinks— you don’t anyone a mental breakdown. You don’t owe anyone a frizzled nervous system. You don’t need to cook yourself silly in order to prove you are a good, caring citizen of this world.
You probably know this about me if you’ve been following me for any amount of time— I take extended breaks when I need them. Sometimes they’re 1 month, sometimes they’re 9 months. I always, always am off social media around the births of my babies because I simply refuse to let craziness into that sacred space.
Social media has changed so much since my first baby was born in 2017 though.
I’m not going to harp on about it— WE KNOW!
It’s never been easier for an everyday person to have a platform, to share their views and to create fame.
But we have also never had access to the details of so many global atrocities.
We are also living in a time where social media is used for such intense psychological manipulation, that family members are cutting each other off for having different political beliefs. People have become such shallow and reactive thinkers that it’s freakishly robotic.
Me-angry-because-me-told-to-be-angry- but-me-not-angry-about-dat-because-my-overlord-said-it-don’t-matter.
These things are not natural, but sadly they’ve become normal.
It’s never been easier to have a voice (yay!), or to create fame (yay??).
It’s also never been trickier to navigate this dynamic, while trying to achieve the kind of peace our nervous systems were actually designed to know…. as part of villages, who found their news out from the local billboard and simply were not expected to respond to every worldwide tragedy.