I choose to remove myself from the babble of the world leaving behind the hate and ignorance as well as the connections I have made.

Once upon a time a beautiful baby was born to a very troubled woman. This baby was special. She was born with a full head of dark hair and eyes that seemed to be older than time itself.

The woman loved babies. So much that she would keep having them if the matriarch of the family had not put a curse on her so that she could never have children again. The matriarch knew that the children were suffering because her daughter had been cursed at birth by a wicked warlock.

He wanted to hurt the woman because he took pleasure in her pain. Perhaps the Matriarch angered him long ago. That is never clear and something we will never know, because life is a story, yet the story has not been written and happy endings, happy in-betweens, they do not always exist.

I can write you a fairy tale, one that talks about how the child grew up to live happily ever after and the mother did not throw herself into the Hudson River to escape her curse leaving her child alone in the world. An orphan, unloved and unwanted despite the potential she held within her.

However, that would be just that, a fairy tale. We are conditioned as children and adults that we Deserve to be happy. We are convinced that our way of looking at the world is the only way. The challenge is that at some point we become so set in our ways and so closed off to others who are different that we, for some inconceivable reason we will go against our fellow human beings and try to cause hurt. We become angered because they do not believe in us. We become enraged because they will not bend to our ideals and we judge them harshly.

Right now this country and the human beings who crawl upon this world, our mother Gia, are locusts. We are a selfish species. We are more concerned with being an individual that we decide it is more important than the whole.

We are infants using technology that we were not quite ready for. I wonder if in years to come this will change. Perhaps we can evolve a bit and know that while the individual is important, so are the masses. There are so many who are filled with such hate, fear, and ignorance not to mention (but I will) control and power that we are more concerned with the individual.

Of course, there are also those whose lives are so shitty or unfulfilling that they want everyone to feel pain. This is not always conscious but social media is a great example of how our race is not quite grown up enough to be allowed to be online. (I am laughing right now at that though. Never happen.)

Anyway, my point, if you have not gotten there yet is that people are complex and simple at the same time. What we do online can cause harm and those who enjoy that are sad people who need a hug. I am guilty of making choices on social media that I regret. That is one of the reasons that I have decided that I will no longer participate and this decision makes you feel lonely because Facebook offers the illusion of connection while distancing us. We provide these happy pages and only show the good picture and the good times.

There is also the illusion of friendship that can be confusing and frustrating. Now I am Gen X and that means that I lived before all of this. I remember when we did not have computers and had to use typewriters if we had to type assignments. I only knew the people in my world in a way that made life more optimistic. I remember waiting at home for a phone call because we did not even have an answering machine, you know that thing we used before text messages? 😎  Hell growing up we had those bloody rotary phones. I still have nightmares of trying to call for help but I keep having to start over because I turned the wrong number!

So, while I was working up to this point, progress has been made and I have been thinking about the life I want to live. The woman I want to be. I suffer regularly. Yesterday 6/29/20 was an extremely bad day. I was so low I was on the floor. I was in so much psychological pain I started to plan my exit from this world. Fortunately, I was able to realize what was happening and I went to my mom’s for support.

I realized last night that it was time for me to stop. Stop torturing myself by watching lives that I have nothing to do with, watching people live and be ‘normal’. While I sat in the dark feeling lost and alone in the world. I was so overwhelmed I did not understand what was happening or why. This is why I have chosen to make my world smaller. I need to focus on myself and my healing. The decision to remove myself from social media was a hard but healthy choice on my part. The reason for this is that I cannot save the world and I cannot force, nor would I want to, people to see things the way I do.

My responsibility in life is to not harm and to heal and grow as a human being and this decision, as difficult as it was, was the right one. Now is the time to write learn and heal. Now is the time to work on becoming myself, whoever that may be. I do not care about anyone’s opinion but my own and I will not force myself to engage in triggers that are so prevalent on social media.

We all have to find our way in this world and write our own stories. The ending we won’t know until it happens but while we are here, that is the time to live your best life. Whatever it takes.