Gabs Writes

Tag: anxiety

  • You are enough

    You are enough

    Listen. You are enough. You don’t have to be more. Being you is enough.

    You are valuable and your worth can’t solely be measured by what you produce. Or by what you achieve or fail to achieve. Or by what invisible standards you are trying to live up to.

    Maybe you’ve been tired lately. Ditched your hobbies. Abandoned your side hustle. Given up on running. Stopped meal prepping.

    Guess what? You’re still valuable. You are enough. You deserve care and support and empathy and love.

    Maybe you’ve been intending to write a blog post for three weeks but a combination of childcare and full time work and generally bad news in the world has sapped your desire to actually sit down and write it. (Or you write it in your head a lot but writing it on the keyboard is somehow an impassable barrier. Anxiety is weird.)

    Maybe you don’t have the job you want. And it doesn’t pay you enough. (Most likely it doesn’t pay you enough!) Or you spend days procrastinating instead of working toward your deadlines. Or you aren’t working in the evenings when you feel like you should to help you get ahead. All the email newsletters full of helpful tips and webinars you intend to attend are sitting neglected in your inbox.

    Or maybe you work a service job where people are jerks and yell at you for no reason and criticize you for not smiling enough and your manager won’t give you a consistent schedule. Maybe everyone wants you to forget that a pandemic happened (and is still happening wtf) but you have to go work anyway to eke out a living only to have weirdos claim you don’t deserve a livable wage.

    You still have value. You’re still enough. You’re still worth basic human compassion.

    Maybe you used to have hobbies and you don’t have them anymore. Maybe all the motivation seems have to leached out of your body drop by drop and you can’t seem to do anything but scroll social media and promise yourself that you’ll wake up early tomorrow and do better. (A lesson I should have learned better by now but still haven’t.)

    Believe in yourself as much as this puppy believes in you. This puppy knows you deserve all the kisses regardless of whether you got your taxes done on time. (Photo by PartTime Portraits on Unsplash)

    Maybe you buy a lot of a groceries with the intent making lots of great meals but then you order takeout instead. Maybe you keep meaning to learn the guitar or start weightlifting or take an online class or watch that documentary.

    Maybe you simply don’t care anymore and can’t force yourself to care and any plans for the future simply get swallowed up by dread.

    You’re still doing enough. Even if it feels like falling behind.

    Having goals is good. Intending to improve yourself is good. But you don’t actually have to achieve goals and become a perfect efficient glowing version of yourself to have value. The depressed version of you who spent the morning crying, who hasn’t showered in four days and is eating potato chips for breakfast while watching YouTube on your phone instead of doing the dishes has value too.

    Plenty of people who are smarter than me and have analytical brains that haven’t become smooth as eggs have written about the BS surrounding hustle culture and how we are trying to life hack our way to perfect efficiency inside of a whole mess of broken systems. How this mindset is making us all feel like failures if we’re not becoming the picture of #lifegoals.

    I can’t fix the broken systems. But I can tell you that even if you fail to live up to weird impossible standards or even realistic ones, you are still enough!

    Try to extend this grace to yourself. And others. It’s hard out there. A bunch of bad stuff is happening and for some reason people in power are trying to punch down on people who need the most care, empathy and understanding.

    It’s a good time to remember that other people are enough too. When we expect ourselves and others to fit the perfect portrait of what we expect to deserve empathy, we’re doing ourselves a disservice. Maybe someone is in a circumstance because they made a bad choice. Maybe things happened outside of their control. Probably it’s a complicated mix of both! Do we really need to demand of someone that they only make good choices to be worthy of help?

    Do we really need to demand that of ourselves?

    We all make bad choices. And some good ones. And some that are bad but were the best ones you had at the time. That’s okay! People are so endlessly complicated but being complicated is super exhausting so we look to simplify. And by simplifying sometimes we reach the conclusion that we (or others) are bad or unworthy.

    But you’re not! The world is wild. You are a valuable piece of it. You don’t have to prove it.

    Seriously. You have value. You are enough. You’re doing a lot.

    Are you doing it all perfectly? No, but are you doing it good enough? Probably! Cut yourself some slack.

  • Those who stop doomscrolling are probably still doomed to repeat it

    Those who stop doomscrolling are probably still doomed to repeat it

    I just logged in to get this screenshot. I SWEAR. (Thanks to Visual Watermark for the text on image assist.)

    I quit Twitter a couple weeks ago.

    Again.

    My relationship with Twitter has often been unhealthy (a common refrain of Twitter users), but during the pandemic, it really ratcheted up in terms of being a life sucking source. I could not stop doomscrolling. Continually glued to all the absolutely horrendous news about politics, police violence, widespread protests, the fact that California was on fire, just all of it.

    There were times when I thought or said out loud that I needed to stop. Having the internet prove to me every day that the entire world was an absolute dumpster fire was not really the most calming habit I could have picked up during a stressful time. It also made being pregnant real weird. (Even weirder than being pregnant during a pandemic was already.)

    I officially logged out a few times and managed well for a few days or a week at a time. One time I had successfully left Twitter and then Ruth Bader Ginsberg died a month before a national election. When the election itself actually happened, I stayed off all social media for a few days because my anxiety had already reached such a peak I didn’t think I’d be able to survive it. Then, when the votes started suggesting that the results wouldn’t be disastrous, I got back on to celebrate.

    Sometimes there is good stuff on Twitter! Nothing makes me laugh out loud quite like an absolutely bizarre tweet or meme that you only understand when the Twitter brain worms have fully taken over. Because I am officially an Old, and will never download TikTok, I got to see some of the best of TikTok through Twitter. This particular dance to “Rasputin” by Boney M. for example. So delightful!

    The less pleasant aspects of the platform, though, started to outweigh the other stuff. Dunking stupid tweets and dogpiling people seems to be Twitter’s favorite pastime. And although I hardly ever tweet and am too scared to voice opinions to become the Twitter main character of the day, the ghost of that threat seems to loom over all interactions.

    Piling on can be fun in the moment, and it can often reveal truly bizarre intersections of humanity (the most recent examples being Bean Dad and the Cinnamon Toast Shrimp Guy), but it finally started to dawn on my that this meant all my feed was breeding was negativity. Everyone is criticizing everyone. Either because they won’t open a can of beans for their daughter or because people are taking the bean thing way to seriously or because nobody can just have fun on the internet anymore or–

    Even all this might not have been enough to do it. Social media addiction is real and so is starting the doomscroll anytime you have a free second.

    But I had a second kid in December and went back to work in March. I’m up for an hour in the middle of the night most nights. My sleep is pretty destroyed and my days are an absolute blur of taking care of children, trying to productive at work, cramming in a boatload of chores, and then collapsing in an exhausted heap so I can sleep for three hours before the baby wakes me up.

    Most nights, I try to squeeze in a tiny bit of personal time before the exhausted collapsing part. Read a little bit, watch a short show, have an actual conversation with my husband. When Twitter was how I spent my personal time, I got sucked in for far too long, which was then further destroyed my already terrible sleep schedule.

    It all came to a head and I logged out. It’s been two or three weeks now. (I honestly can’t remember just how long because time means nothing these days.) I miss the memes and the goofiness somewhat. But I’m also getting a little more reading in. If I pick up my phone mindlessly, I try to open an ebook or put the phone back down. I can’t marvel at hot takes that truly bend the fabric of the universe, but I can get to bed thirty minutes earlier.

    Mocking Spongebob meme with the text, "I logged of Twitter. What a life hack."
    What I look like talking about how much I’ll achieve now that I’m off social media. (Find image here.)

    Does this make me a better person than anyone still on Twitter? Nope. Social media can be great for people for a whole of reasons.

    Which makes me think. Just because Twitter isn’t good for me right now, could it have been at some point? Despite all the bad on the platform, could the sheer amount of time I spent doomscrolling on Twitter in 2020 have been a little bit good? I was anxious all the time, but that would have been the case anyway. And because I couldn’t see anyone and was essentially trapped in my home, I could at least log on and see that everyone else was feeling the same. We all sort of went a little bit mad together, true, but would it have been any better doing that alone?

    The isolation of the pandemic was pretty heightened for me. Being pregnant is difficult and doing it mostly alone was ever harder. Not that anything I was doing online had to do with the pregnancy. But still. Maybe it was helpful while it needed to be and now I’m entering a new phase where it’s not. Different things for different stages of life and all that.

    Will I stay off Twitter forever? Unlikely. I will be very proud of myself for hitting some milestone in the future. Tell myself that I’ve broken the habit and it can’t hurt to log back on and take a peek for just 30 minutes. Then I’ll discover that someone thinks baking cookies is anti-feminist or that some person we all used to love is actually super problematic or that the shipping wars have fired up over a new media property. And I’ll be right back in it.

    Hopefully, next time, with more really fun dance routines.