With a Little Help from Your Virtual Friends

In February of 2020, just before the pandemic shutdown, I had to go on medical leave from work for my mental health. I found myself extremely emotional, struggling through my life as a result of post traumatic stress disorder (ptsd). I began to do some deep work on myself where I had to focus on healing from my trauma and on remembering who I was, what I cared about, and what I wanted out of life.

At this time, I had a fledging Instagram account that I was consciously curating to be an extremely positive space for myself. There is much said about how social media can be bad for your mental health, how it can lead you to comparisons that leave you feeling badly, or how people just feel free to be mean from the comfort of their own computer. I have found that all to be true, but I have also found the opposite to be true as well. Social media can be a means to support mental health as well. It can be a place where you can find connection, inspiration, and support, sometimes when you need it the most. It can be a place that reminds you that you are not alone. This is what happened to me.

During this time, I came across the work of Marilyn McNeal (chantmagick on Instagram). Marilyn is an artist, a maker, and a digital media instructor. She posted videos of her dancing out in nature with her original music compositions. I found them so soothing especially as I was developing my own relationship to nature to heal my soul. We both live in the Bay Area, so there was a familiarity to some of the locations. She talked about her process and her journey, and there was a sense of commonality around navigating the human experience. The videos and her message felt like a shining light inside the dark place that I found myself in.

I had started developing a relationship to nature myself as part of my trauma healing. In the beginning, I couldn’t sit still and be with myself. It was extremely hard for me. As a way to deal with my anxiety, I started collecting and stacking the things I found in nature as a way to learn to stay with myself. This turned into me making land art as a way to process my emotions, and there were many of them to process. Throughout this time Marilyn’s videos gave me faith that a relationship with nature could renew me, and her following my land art helped me believe in myself and continue down this creative path.

Marilyn and I had been interacting for a short while on Instagram when she posted an announcement that she was offering some workshops on media making and storytelling. I felt drawn to sign up for her Storytelling on Instagram workshop. I didn’t really have any plans for my account, but I liked what Marilyn was saying and how she was saying it, so I wanted to learn more about how to tell stories.

I am so glad that I did. Marilyn is an incredible teacher. She is both extremely knowledgeable as well as generous and kind in spirit. I was a beginner posting things on my Instagram without any clear idea of what I was doing or why I was doing it. I left her workshop with a better sense of who I was, what I wanted to share in my digital space, and why I was sharing my stories. I also left with very specific tips of how to make small changes to my account to help me do that. For me it was never about being an influencer or anything like that, it was about finding my voice and using my online space in a way that worked for me while hopefully offering something positive to someone else.

Sometimes people can shine a light that helps you see where you could go. I am so grateful to Marilyn for doing that for me. I hope that I can pay it forward by doing that for someone else as well.