Just a handful of years ago, people didn’t know the details of what their social circles were up to unless they read it in the newspaper, heard town gossip, or experienced the good old-fashioned way of talking face to face or on the telephone with others. In today’s world, through social media, people can figuratively peek into the windows of another person’s “house,” a.k.a., their minds, hopes, fears, dreams, and intimate details about their lives.
Recently, it was nearing the decade mark since I made the decision to leave social media. I jumped off all platforms at a prime, formative age when these apps were at their height, and it was “weird” for a person my age not to have any social media accounts.
My Struggles Growing Up in the Digital Generation
Growing up, I struggled with social media and had personal trauma associated with it after being a victim of cyberbullying. Once I realized how much my participation in these platforms was affecting my mental health, I made the decision to jump off. It was definitely isolating in some ways, and when people I met in real life tried to ask for my Instagram handle or Facebook name to connect with me online, I had to respond, saying that I didn’t use any social media at the moment. I would awkwardly respond with something like, “I could give you my number or maybe my email?” Their eyes glazed over like I was some stranger from a distant planet, and some even reacted in ways that suggested they were frustrated they wouldn’t have an easy avenue into information about me or my life. During these years without any social media presence, there were times I tried rejoining so that I could interact with my family and friends, but I ended up jumping off again when I realized I still wasn’t ready for it.
After being on social media during my childhood, I found that I was projecting a façade of my life online as if it was an exhausting life of perfection and bliss. I felt like I had to do it to be accepted socially in my environment. Everyone around me was doing it, so I had to as well. The era and society my generation grew up in have been so pressured to project perfect versions of our lives online to prove to people that we are worthy of love and validation. We’ve missed the opportunity to actually go out, live a real life, and not seek external validation through a screen. I’m sure others who consume social media feel these annoyances and are guilty of similar feelings. We were all copying each other’s posts, we all had to follow the trends, and we had to make sure that everyone else knew the things we were doing and achieving. How important it was to make sure all our followers knew that we had the most amazing sandwich at brunch on Sunday!
My Real Life Became an Online Life
Even when I hung out with my friends in real life, many of the conversations and actions (including taking bunches of pictures) centered around our online lives. My friends inspected my Instagram page in front of me and critiqued the things I was sharing, telling me I looked a little too big in that photo, and, oh, here’s an app you can use to photoshop your body. When I told a friend how excited I was for my upcoming family vacation, her initial reaction was, “Oh my gosh, I can’t imagine how amazing the photos for your Instagram are going to be.” I overheard a conversation between girls talking about another girl and how she wasn’t worthy of their time because she had “only” 700 followers (which is quite a bunch in my book?!). I had someone tell me that they would never post some of the things I posted because they were “cringe.” I wanted to post the things that I wanted to post, not the things that anyone else wanted me to post, but there was constant judgment and pushback from people who had to conform to the “standards” of online life for fear of the exact same criticism they were giving to me. I ultimately concluded for myself that the very act of posting our personal lives on social media is “cringe” because never before in human history had it been a requirement to lay bare your entire existence to the World Wide Web. I concluded that the people there, including myself, were taking it way too seriously. And I wanted to hang out with people who were enjoying living real life, not in a virtual, dystopian world. It was difficult to find these people, though.
Going Dark and Deleting My Accounts
Living an online life was exhausting. I was putting so much brain space into the pettiest things that could have been spent on more productive things. When I entered new environments, it made it more difficult to heal and move on from my past with constant online reminders of my trauma. And I no longer felt the need to participate in it and try to seek the approval of others. I wanted to inspire others with my healing story one day, but I needed to actually start working on my own healing.
So, I permanently deleted all my social media accounts, stopped looking at what everyone else was doing, and went through a deep, soul-searching process, asking myself what I really wanted. Did I want a simpler life? Yes. Did I want everything to stop being a life-or-death situation when these things really didn’t matter? Yes. Should I start saving up for 100 acres and a tiny home? Maybe. Should I move to Europe? Sounds nice. Should I go back home? Not yet. Should I become a Buddhist? They seem genuinely content. Should I set off on a pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago in Spain that I heard about on that one podcast, where the guest speaker reported that her life did a complete 180 after she walked it and returned to America? Should I do that thing that Aaron Rogers did where he locked himself in a dark cabin for a few days, forcing himself to sit with his own thoughts? What did I want?
My fulfillment and consistent contentment are found within me
This process and the questions they produced spanned many years. It was actually really amazing giving myself the time and space to ponder these things without the temptation to compare my life to the carefully fabricated highlight reels of others. As much as I tried to tell myself I could handle social media, I couldn’t, and I knew that for myself, so I finally pulled the plug and got off everything. I was off for almost 8 years, giving myself years to discover who I was and take all the time I needed to find myself. I can’t say I’ve fully found myself yet (has anyone?), but I am now able to participate in online communities as long as I set limits for myself, not think about it too hard, and remind myself each time I enter the app that nothing on there is real life.
My True Fulfillment Does Not Come from a Screen
I finally recognized that my true fulfillment does not come from anything external or materialistic. It especially does not come from the temporary validation of others. My fulfillment and consistent contentment are found within me. Regardless of the external things in my life, I can be content where I am while still having ambition for the future. There is no need to put an insane amount of pressure on myself. I do not need to think that I have to do what everyone else is doing to be worthy because that isn’t the case. Most of the things I thought I had to do growing up were only because I saw that everyone else was doing them and they were shoved into my face all the time through social media, but I knew deep down these things wouldn’t bring me fulfillment. I didn’t know at the time that there were other options for personal fulfillment besides what I was seeing online, but when I started seeing bits and pieces of a wide world out there of endless possibilities that more closely aligned with who I wanted to be, I no longer was even tempted to think about what everyone else was doing on social media as I started exploring those options for myself.
Understanding that nothing online necessarily equates with reality
Healing is on my own timeline. And I like the little life I’ve built without the pressure to achieve any societal milestones imposed by others. I would stand beside others and celebrate theirs when they had them, but I knew that I was not ready to jump into things for myself just because I felt like I had to. I was able to reenter online communities almost a decade later with a new mindset based on a foundation of contentment with myself and an understanding that nothing online necessarily equates with reality, so there’s no need for me to feel like I’m not doing enough or that I’m not good enough. I will share the things that I want to share, the things that are meaningful to me, and the things about my story that may lend a helping hand to others struggling.
Everyone has a choice.
Everyone has a choice with social media. Everyone has a choice with what they share. Everyone has a choice with what they consume. It is a choice if we look at what people share and allow ourselves to feel negatively in response. Although I made the choice to rejoin one platform, I have very strict limits for myself, and I prioritize my contentment first. True contentment, for me, comes from embracing the imperfections and messiness of real life while not taking anything too seriously.
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For the longest time, I thought I was inherently “messed up” and broken beyond repair. I spent about a decade running around in circles in the medical system trying to figure out what was “wrong” with me and how to “fix” it, managing all this while attending school and holding full-time jobs. I thought the way I felt in my body was “normal” because I had no sense of what the other side was. My complex trauma symptoms manifested as crippling anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive symptoms (in the form of religious and moral scrupulosity), extreme dissociative symptoms, insomnia, sleep paralysis, night terrors, and narcolepsy. My symptoms began at age 13 and continued into my mid-twenties. In general, I endured multiple types of traumas throughout my formative years, including numerous situations of both individual and large-group interpersonal cruelty, some of which caused me to have to switch environments. Due to what I was going through, my body couldn’t fathom what was happening, and my nervous system shut down. I felt guilty for simply existing. I saw danger everywhere, operated in a panicked survival mode, and lived in fear, anxiety, and isolation. I did my best to appear “normal” on the outside, keep a smile on my face, and control what was happening on the inside, distracting myself with extreme workaholism and doing nice things to serve others. I took active steps to keep branching out in confidence again, but these traumas kept piling onto each other and overlapping, so I couldn’t fathom what was going on. I wasn’t ready to give up yet, though, because I knew my family and friends would be distraught if I did. The most difficult and heartbreaking part of my story is that the two communities I set out to seek healing in—religion and the medical system—caused further trauma when some religious leaders, congregation members, and medical professionals chose to take advantage of my vulnerability for their own motives. In most of these situations, I didn’t even realize I was a victim until outsiders pointed it out for me and that my vulnerability and naïveté made me a target of malicious people. Each future situation of being targeted was just salt on the wound of the original incident. As an extreme empath, I absorbed the negative emotions of others as if they were my own, and I did not know how to release them from my body. In my solo healing process, I had to quite literally disappear from everyone and everything to protect my vulnerability and allow myself to process what I had been through during my formative years using my own mind and body without the persuasion or invasion of others.
What I went through all those years was so severe, and my symptoms and physical body reactions as a result were so excruciating that I went as far as to see a neurologist, concerned that my symptoms were the result of some sort of nervous system disorder. However, he returned with no paperwork in his hands to inform me that there was nothing wrong with me but that I was simply completely traumatized, and my body reacted accordingly. I finally realized that my symptoms were not the result of an inherent mental or physical illness and began to take a trauma-based approach to my healing after many years of believing that I was “sick” for the rest of my life. My true progress began when I finally rejected the lies that were told to me that I would have to “manage my symptoms” for the rest of my life and made the decision to believe for myself that I was fully capable of healing from my excruciating pain, even if others did not believe in me. I still do have tough days and moments, but I have gotten to a place where I am consistently living a quality of life that provides peace and comfort in my mind and body since I have given myself the tools to overcome my tough moments when they return.
Many C-PTSD survivors receive numerous diagnoses before ever hearing anything about complex trauma, and some are overmedicated to try and “fix” their symptoms, usually to no avail and with further side effects. I was told I would need to “manage my symptoms” and be on medication for the rest of my life. It was all lies. Today, I am on zero medications (including sleep medications) and am completely divorced from the disease management system.
I am excited to share many tips for natural, somatic, and holistic healing that have helped me overcome my complex trauma symptoms, such as extreme dissociation, excruciatingly painful flashbacks, severe sleep challenges, anxiety, hypervigilance, worthlessness, and more. I began to pursue unique methods of healing after many years of not seeing much progress through westernized care, and this was the catalyst for fast-tracking my healing. I have so many exciting tips to share related to grounding, nervous system regulation, somatic healing, and more to offer survivors other ways they can learn to regulate their nervous systems on their own without spending any money. I aim to help survivors overcome their feelings of self-guilt, blame, and humiliation and help them realize that their bodies had normal reactions to abnormal situations.
I am on a journey of rediscovering who I am at my core after letting so many other people infiltrate my mind for far too long. The five most important things to me in my life (in order of importance!) are: my health, my happiness, my family, my friends, and my creativity. My parents, my sisters, and my friends are my absolute rock and biggest cheerleaders. They were cheering me on all those years, fully believing that I was capable of overcoming my excruciating pain, even when I did not believe so myself. While I was repeatedly able to forgive others and extend the olive branch, I was never able to forgive myself. My loved ones kept telling me that there is nothing I need to feel humiliated about and that I should be able to see what everyone else sees in me. I have finally given that kindness to myself and have started to see what other people saw in me all along.
I am so glad I didn’t give up when my pain felt unbearable. I know what I’ve survived. I know the work I’ve put in to overcome it. I know that I still chose to keep a smile on my face and be kind in the face of it all. In reality, it’s because I didn’t want another person to go through even one ounce of the suffering I was in. I am finally living a life of consistent peace and contentment, and I am sharing my story from the other side. My story is not a story of defeat but a story of victory.
I have enjoyed embracing the free spirit I always was and adopting a simpler life to focus on the things that are meaningful to me. I am still healing every day. I believe our healing is a lifelong process. I made the decision to escape my version of the rat race (big city life) and move to my happy place. I am catching up on many hours of much-needed rest and spending lots of time outdoors. I am reconnecting with the people I lost while I was in isolation. I invited the passion that saved my life growing up—dance—back into my life. I am passionate about fighting for other survivors in any way I can.
I hope that by sharing my story, I can convince other survivors that there was never anything wrong with them to begin with and that they are capable of living healthy, happy, and fulfilled lives. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I did not become a voice for the voiceless and share how I overcame it. I aim to live my life in love of both others and myself, understanding that everyone has a story of their own. I am grateful to the CPTSD Foundation for giving me an opportunity to share my story.
“My story isn’t sweet and harmonious like invented stories. It tastes of folly and bewilderment. Of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.” ~ Hermann Hesse
