Over a year without politics on my social media: Where I stand now.

January 21, 20203 Comments

I made a few posts about cutting out the toxin that is social media politics. (x, x) People get bitter, mean, and downright nasty when it comes to politics, and when you take away the face to face aspect they get much, much worse. I went down a rabbit hole at the beginning of my Lyme Disease sickness and learned everything there was to know about the political situations of that time. I knew everything and I was always… mad, angry, hurt, judgmental. I was getting emotions that I didn’t like, and they weren’t all from the actual politics, but mostly the people talking about them, and how they were doing it.

So I blocked it all. I took out the trash. I don’t follow most my Facebook friends. I muted almost every political word on Twitter. At first it felt a little empty, because I had gotten so used to all the yelling, but then, it became wonderful. I started following people who had the same hobbies as me. I started branching out. Then suddenly the places that were filled with anger were suddenly filled with joy.

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Little Fixes: Getting rid of my road rage made me a better person

May 16, 2019Leave a comment

We all have little problems, problems that we sweep under the rug because they don’t seem to be a big deal, or we don’t see how changing them will change anything else. We try to tackle bigger things, and sometimes that works out for us, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes these items are to big to tackle all at once. Smaller problems also take time, but not in the same way, they take a week or two of constant reminder and discipline instead of months of it. But they change our lives too, sometimes in ways we wouldn’t think.

I recently was in terrible 5 o’clock traffic and got cut off by someone who almost missed their exit. I cursed under my breath something terribly unkind and had a moment of clarity were I realized that that action didn’t warrant that insult. I’ve cut people off in traffic before and it really wasn’t that big of a deal, because more often then not, it’s a mistake. This break through thought kept circling back around every time I muttered something unkind in traffic, and I started to realize just how often I was doing it.

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Hate is addicting

February 4, 2019Leave a comment

I think we have a skewed perception about what is addicting and what isn’t. There are a lot of substances that aren’t addictive physically but can be mentally. It’s very easy to get hooked on a feeling, hooked on emotions. We can crave the endorphins that something releases or the power we feel when we do a certain act. Are emotions technically addictive? No. Do you get emotional withdraws from them all the same? Yes. That makes them addictive enough in my book.

But it isn’t just the good emotions we get hooked on, it isn’t just things that numb our pain, sometimes we can get addicted to the things that fuel it. It’s an interesting thing really, but more and more people are becoming addicted to outrage, addicted to anger, addicted to hate.

Maybe it’s the way we take in our news, maybe it’s that the most outrageous, enraging headlines are the ones to grab our attention. Maybe it’s that social media has acted as a barrier from other people emotions, so we don’t realize when we are treading to far, maybe then we become desensitized to it to the point that we no longer care when we do. Maybe its the fact that we’re taking in so much hate all the time that we start to think of it as normal, and therefore needlessly dish it back out into the world.

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Outrage is all the rage:

June 19, 2018June 19, 20182 Comments

I’ve noticed something happening over the past few years. Outrage is in style. I should have noticed it sooner then this year, the viral “what are ya’ll mad about today” tweet that made its rounds everyday, opinion pieces losing their journalistic standards and gaining more explanation points, people creating anonymous accounts just to leave untraceable slurs. I was blind to it though, because I was busy being angry like everyone else. The end of that started when I detoxed my social media six months ago, but really, me deleting that only opened my eyes to how much anger there was, and how much people enjoy being enraged.

When I deleted all the politics and anger from my feeds I noticed that I had problems checking the accounts I had unfollowed. It wasn’t because I was uninformed, I was still keeping up with the news by following sites that reported facts without the slant. It was because I missed the raging opinions. I missed the hot takes.

I thought I missed the passion.

It’s a really interesting situation, being enthralled in anger makes us feel like we’re doing something about the issue, even if we’re just ranting online or to friends who in turn rant back, but in reality all we’re doing is stoking fires that burn out of control.

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Four reasons to forgive those who’ve done you wrong:

August 23, 20172 Comments

“Why should I forgive them? They did me wrong and they never apologized.”

We’ve all had these moments when we’re upset, we’re hurt, we’re angry, and we’re completely unwilling to let go of our hard feelings. Those feelings are justified and we know it, but they aren’t supposed to last. Here are four reasons to forgive people who’ve done you wrong.

Grudges take a lot of time: We can talk about how healing forgiving someone is in a second, but lets start with this, when you’re holding onto a grudge you’re spending way to much time on someone who probably isn’t spending anytime on you. Toxic people aren’t worth your time. You might rant about it some to friends, but when your not it will keep coming back up in your thoughts, and it does that for a reason, because your mind doesn’t like when emotions go unresolved, by not forgiving someone you are keeping their tab open in your mind, you have to tie up those feelings, and you can’t do that and keep a grudge at the same time.

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