It’s been a little over a week since I impulsively decided to take a social media hiatus. I started to feel like I couldn’t hear my own thoughts and I was constantly immersed in details and thoughts of other people’s lives. I also realised that I had never really taken a meaningful break off social media. All of that added to a desperate impulse to take the break while I felt motivated to. I stuck a note on two of my accounts and deleted the apps from my phone.
In the time since I’ve been away, some huge things have happened in the world and I’ve been able to read it, acknowledge it and move on. That’s very different to the usual, when one event can span a whole day of reading everyone’s thoughts and sharing mine on the same thing. Sometimes on social media, it feels like you are not allowed to take a break from hard things. You must be immersed in every pain and every suffering in real time. You cannot be silent, you cannot be unfeeling. You must take on every single pain and sign every petition. You must never look alway. And lord, it is exhausting.
There is power in group change -absolutely. I love the way voices are amplified and change is made- it is a tool that has done so much, but at the same time, everyone cannot be part of every change everyday. We cannot all have the same weight of feeling for everything every time. Because as much as we have collective suffering, we still have individual suffering. And there is also a need for joy and for distraction and for laughter. I have privileges and I have disadvantages that I don’t want to acknowledge EVERY SINGLE DAY.
Of course, no one puts a gun to my head and forces me to use my social media in a particular way but I’m only human and peer pressure is real. So is empathy. Having a front seat to real time pain and suffering, it’s hard to ignore and to look away.
Of course, there are other things that bother me- when I finally like a style of illustration and then I scroll and see 20 other styles that suddenly appeal to me or I’ve decided to do photography a certain way and I see 100 other ways that I may like better. I’m trying to find my own voice in many aspects, the same way I have found my writing voice. No matter how many books, articles or blogs I read, I write how I write and there’s freedom in that. I want that freedom in as many things as possible.
I still have 3 weeks left on my break and I am extremely excited. I’ve been reading a book a day and having really intense dreams, I’ve been learning again to have opinions that I don’t share. I’ve been writing in that intense way where you start typing and words start flowing on the page in a way you didn’t anticipate. I have clarity, I have freedom and I know these feelings will change as the weeks go by and I’m excited to see how.