This little light of mine…

These are strange days inside my head. Strange days indeed. A year ago I was another person entirely. Injured. Scared. Unsure of where my place was in the world. Very alone even thought I married my best friend only a few months prior.

Now I find that my mind has been replaced with someone else’s. She’s nothing like the girl that lived inside my head before. This new girl is caring, sensitive, emotional, goal oriented, and she is genuinely happy. I love this girl. I love me. I did a lot of soul searching, trying to understand how this came to be and I think it’s ultimately the result of working for what I wanted and not accepting anything less. I wanted to be respected by those in my life whether it be my co-workers, my family, or my friends. Anything less than that resulted in me discarding, walking away, or outright demanding that I have what I wanted. At times I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I have been overbearing to the point of being a bully but, for me, I feel that the ends justified the means. In order to have peace sometimes there has to be a war… sometimes that war is violent. Sometimes it’s devastating beyond any realm of comprehension. Sometimes there’s nothing left and all that can be done is to rebuild on the ashes and the wasteland that is left over. I think, for me, that’s what happened.

I literally carpet bombed my life into a decimation that was beyond all hope but then I began to build. I had done this before but I put it together with chewing gum, popsicle sticks, and hay and it all came apart again. This time I used the strongest materials I could get and I made sure it would stick. My supports, friends, were only the best that I could find and if they weren’t positive or good people that would be there when I needed them and would allow me to do the same in return… they were placed outside the wall. My job, career, took time to locate but when I found it, I made sure it was the right place for me and now I have gone from a temp staff member to a full time member of the team in as little as a few months. I wake up each work day excited for any challenge and opportunity that I’ll experience. My family has been repaired once my expectations were set that I would not be treated poorly any longer and those wishes were respected. 

The results of all of this are nothing short of remarkable from the perspective of my own eyes looking back on a life that is so marred by anger and depression. Sure, I have moments where I get annoyed and I lash out but to see a happy video or a post about something that genuinely affects me to the core and to be able to exhibit an emotion such as joy or sorrow is something so foreign to me that I embrace it. To be able to see an individual I’ve been working with begin a path to recovery after a struggle for many months and feel so overwhelmed with happiness at their progress that I burst into tears on the way back from the visit shows that what I do means something to me. My life simply isn’t a day to day existence any longer. It truly is a life being lived and it’s all lived away from the reach of technology.

This is where my segue occurs… I watched a video today of a gentleman who, for lack of a better way of putting it, pulled a stunt in a Hannaford grocery store. He was singing “This Little Light of Mine” loudly and after a time people joined in and soon the whole store was in on it. For a moment the whole group was connected in this rare display of human interaction that so rarely occurs these days. Watching it had me feeling truly overcome with emotion because I felt a) happy that these people were having fun but b) sad in some ways because our society has lost a bit of itself because we no longer connect on even the simplest levels. Friends don’t call one another to chat. They text. Even when hanging out at dinners or at each other’s houses it’s never a surprise to see people pulling their phones out to check for messages, Facebook, texting someone else, or just looking around online. They’re not engaged with the individual they’re supposed to be with in the room. In society, people don’t talk at bus stops or in subways, they play Candy Crush or whatever game is popular or they pretend in order to avoid the “risk” of having to talk to each other. They listen to music. They insulate themselves from the world and hide.

Is this really living if we only take part in a small piece of life? If we’re chained to a piece of technology and we don’t allow ourselves to reach out and connect with one another without the use of a text-based system? If we don’t use our voices to pick up on the subtle nuances of the conversation? If we can’t grant each other the eye contact that is so important to show we are interested in what our companion is saying? Are we afraid to do so now? Have we lost that ability because we are so insular now that technology has bred two generations of socially phobic technophiles that depend on their phones and computers and tablets just to communicate, who become verbally constipated when asked to use their words? I think we have.

This is where I drew the line for myself. This is where I said no more and I've been learning to end my dependence on such things. Friends are encouraged to talk with me in person when they're close enough. If they aren’t, we talk on the phone. When working with participants I insist they put their phones down and look at me while we speak. Or I ask that they turn away from the computer and face me out of respect for our conversation. In our home, my husband and myself don’t have our phones out during serious discussions out of respect for one another and when I’m with family for gatherings, I make sure the phone is on silent and it’s away. It's taken some time to break the habit of checking over and over but in time, the addiction and the insecurity has started to go away and I'm finding my voice. The excuse of, “I’m too socially phobic,” is becoming lost and the truth of “I’m too busy” is really true or if I don’t want to get together, it's a legitimate, “I really don’t want to hang out with you,” because those people are outside of the wall and earning their way back in.

The reliance on technology concerns me and I think part of it has to do with the fact that technology contributed a great deal to my damage as a person. Growing up I was a gregarious child in spite of the fact that I had a lot of shitty experiences. Even still, I didn’t let that stop me from trying to make friends and being a good one in turn. It wasn’t until I got online that I became an angry, shitty person who bordered on narcissistic and didn’t care what others felt and allowed my emotions to rule over me. On the internet, you’re the most important thing in the world and when you’re not looking at the person you’re talking to, it’s easy to disregard their feelings. Text messages can work this way too. It was easy to hide away and become mired in this so-called “social anxiety” that I supposedly had. If there’s one thing I learned in my current line of work, the best way to combat anxiety is to expose yourself to the thing you’re scared of… so if you’re scared of being around people, the last thing you need is to be online or hiding behind a text message. We all could do with a lot less of that shit in our lives. Sometimes just saying hi to a stranger or seeing an old friend changes the course of your life in ways you wouldn’t expect. Sometimes you make new friends in the process. But how are you going to know if you’re stuck behind a computer or staring at a phone?

It’s not a rhetorical question. The answer is that you won’t.