Begging Me for a Like

It was late at night, I was lying in bed scrolling social media on my iPhone. A eerily feeling creep into my chest from the emptiness of what I was experiencing. My brain scrambled to continue to scroll as the aching in my chest grew. Each day I consumed social media the ache was present. I felt disheartened and lost in world of glowing devices luring me in. The lack of substance left an ache in my heart. Everything was so glossy and smooth, filtered, plucked and pruned. The filters, and their monocratic themes felt so flat and uninspiring.

Instagram was begging me for a like, and all I felt was hollowness. It was beckoning me into the glossy sameness. My stomach clenched trying not to vomit. I couldn’t move my fingers anymore to hit the heart button. My body wasn’t budging. Frozen. My thumb suspended mid-air. I felt the NO ripple through every cell of my body. My body was done participating. When my soul moves me so deeply and with certainty, I listen. My body screams “no” long before I know “why.” I stopped waiting for the why and started exploring the no. I’ve experienced this freezing in my body before, when I heard the words “leave, it’s the only way”. I screamed, begged, got angry, screamed some more… “why are you doing this to me?” My ability to resist had hurt me in the past. Now I will drop everything to listen even when it makes “no sense.” Leaving or changing comes with so much pain. Time shows me that each one of those moments took me somewhere amazing within myself. Priceless places. Even when it hurt. Examining social media felt pretty mild compared to some past “no’s”. My resistance was very low and I was quick to calculate that is was worth the time to listen to the message coming from my body.

So I listened. I read. I went into a deep introspection. I ask questions. Read some more. Meditated. My brain changed so much. I had already barely shared anything about myself, now the desire was completely null with no impulse I needed to meter. It felt weird. Sometimes I didn’t know what it all meant. It was a long, hard period of self reflection. I had went through a lengthy identity crisis and further integration that left me at the fringes of my psyche trying to figure out my “I am.” I was buried under some epic philosophical works; plus psychotherapy work of Marion Woodman followed by starting Carl Jung. Their words brought me nourishment that was absent from social media. Marion Woodman had taken me on the journey of addiction to things we do to avoid soul work and connection to our bodies. Her work with reconnected to what I felt. The hollowness was always present. I simply could no longer ignore it. Everything I thought I was or liked slipped through my fingers like sand.

It ended up being a year long break from normal social media use. My accounts were private, too. There was the occasional pop onto Facebook. I tried to log onto Instagram, even drop a story or two. I felt nothing. I was bored by it all. My brain didn’t care to even notice who saw my stories.

Byung-Chul Yan, a Swiss German philosopher, writes “what is smooth does not injure. Nor does it offer resistance. It is looking for a like. The smooth object deletes it's Against. Any form of negativity is removed.” In other words, when we smooth an object or ourselves looking for a “like” we attempt to become the same as what already gets that attention. We avoid that which is against getting a “like”. Any form of negativity… and resistance is removed. Sameness multiples. This becomes amplified by algorithms that delivers us more of the sameness that validates our way of being. We have turned our world of social media to an overly-glossy easy to consume commodity and in the process we lost touch with the negative of life. The negative edges of life that give life more meaning, depth and beauty are lost. The Against creates an “other” and uniqueness. Another angle we may not have noticed before or an ah-ha moment that comes in in the challenge the negative poses. The beauty found in negativity moves us to tears, confronts our shadows and fears, brings up our existential angst and confronts us with deeper questions.

Our social media world is plagued with sameness, but also with the constant bombarding of “you are not enough”, “buy this”, “you should”, “is your skin smooth enough”… you should look like, be like someone else. It wants us to buy, not think for too long. It needs us disconnected from ourselves so we happily consume thinking we will find ourselves somewhere in that consumption, while it takes us further from ourselves. The loop is unquenchable until it destroys our essence.

I knew that social media was something I would not escape fully, because I feel this deep call within myself to write and create content that makes the world a little better. Yet I knew that I couldn’t get swept in the sameness or to suppress my soulful creativeness to be easily commodified. What that looked like, I didn’t know. That left even bigger questions I was trying to get a grip on and answer. About six months into my journey of questioning I started my new social media ecosystem. I wanted to let go of all the old parts of me in my old social media accounts. Vocal is part of the new. It took me another six months to care to post, and to share my thoughts.

Trying to find my soul’s deeper expression in all the white noise of how and what I should be was a challenge. In one year, who I found and the body I have begin to inhabit unapologetically has been magical. My body shown me another lesson that has only began to cellularly resonate.

The world needs us to come home within; to find our quirks, to embrace all the cracked pieces of ourselves and to make friends with our wrinkles while we unapologetically dance our way through life.

~ Xena Grace