Enough's Enough

A couple of months ago, I started to well and truly unravel. I've had wobbles before but they started to become more and more frequent so that I had less and less time in between to recover. There were several causes to my downward spiral but the main and, looking back with hindsight, most obvious cause was my inability to disconnect from social media. It's one thing to be constantly checking your phone and to spend a significant amount of time scrolling through Twitter and Instagram but I had let it go so much deeper. I was letting the potential opinions of strangers dictate my life when I wasn't even looking at a screen. And yes, I did say the *potential* opinions of strangers. Meaning that every decision I was about to make, I would first try and guess how those who followed me might react to that decision and then I would adapt accordingly. 

Random strangers on the internet would be taken into consideration when making minimal decisions like what to wear, drink and eat. If I had forgotten to bring my reusable KeepCup/water bottle with me, instead of just realising that I'm human and sometimes that happens and trust my audience to understand, I would make sure no picture/selfie was taken of me holding a disposable cup because of the backlash it once caused that I didn't want to deal with again. I stopped posting as much about food I was eating because if it wasn't vegetarian/vegan I'd be berated by those who were and if it was vegetarian/vegan I'd be berated by meat-eaters for, get this, "giving in to political correctness". If I posted a picture of a cake, the fat shaming would start and if I posted about a salad people would send me messages of concern that the fat shamers had finally got to me. If I posted about Disney, I'd be called "childish". If I posted about American Horror Story I'd be told I was "pretending" just to appeal to a more adult audience. If I tagged a brand I liked just because I liked them and not because I was paid to, I would be reported to the ASA/CMA for not being transparent about a brand deal but if I did post an AD, I was "selling out". If I didn't swear on my channel I was a "princess" and if I did I was a "bad role model". If I posted about my boyfriend it was an attempt to "prove we were still together" but if I didn't post about him, our relationship was questioned. If I posted about my brother it was just an attempt to "get followers" but if I didn't, we "secretly hated each other". If I talked about my job too much I was "showing off" and if I talked about it too little I was "unprofessional". It got to a point where I felt like I could only be on public display if I contorted myself into every single box that was laid out by the 600,000 people who followed me and I felt constantly at war in my own head. I felt unable to own my decisions and even my mistakes because I had become so worn down by backlash that I had lost sight of what warranted a genuine apology and what was merely a difference of opinion. But whilst some of my audience's expectations of me were unrealistic, it was my inability to disconnect that was the issue. On the other end of the spectrum, there were rumours and lies and hate like I never could have imagined. About how I'd slept with producers to get certain jobs, how I was a prostitute on the side which is how I managed to buy a house at twenty-six, about how all my boyfriends have been gay and I'm a professional "beard". Despite it all simply being the product of petty rumour mill created by bored strangers that I've never met, when you're the target of that kind of vitriol for year upon year it wears you down. You can no longer just laugh it off because it's no longer funny. The amalgamation of well meaning people trying to guide me with heavy hands towards a better lifestyle and those who just wanted to see me fall, began to affect my actual, meaningful relationships with the people I love. I could see how worried they were at how often I was melting down and at how quickly I was spiralling toward breaking point.

So, finally, on one particularly bleak morning, I reached out for professional help. I've been in counselling and have been diagnosed with anxiety triggered by work related stress. I'm honestly a little shocked at myself for how long it took me to seek help. It took for me to feel like I was on the verge of a mental breakdown before I admitted to others (and myself) that I couldn't cope alone anymore. I've always been open about how I've felt but only to family and friends who couldn't actually teach me how to adapt my way of thinking and implement changes in my life that could keep me a little safer. I needed a professional to steer me in the right direction. In the sessions I've had thus far, I've usually left and had a big cry as I've walked back to the station but ultimately I've felt stronger in the decisions I've made since and I'm much less inclined to share those decisions with social media. 

Social media has been part of my life since I joined Facebook when I was fifteen. I've grown up online and when I set up my YouTube channel at eighteen, I built boundaries far too close to home. Some of those boundaries have been crashed through over the years but I never built them back up. Instead, I just kept letting people in whether they were fuelled by love or hate and I convinced myself that that's just what social media was. SozLolBye! *shrug emoji*. But it's not. Or it shouldn't be, at least. So I've taken big, awkward, necessary steps to rebuild my boundaries and set them further away from my personal life so there's a clear line between my private life and my public one. This is why when I move back into my house, I won't be doing a "House Tour". If people see my house in the background of photos or videos, I'm fine with that but I won't be going to any extra lengths to give people I don't know the blueprints to my home. I recently got a tattoo and if people happen to see it, whatever, but I won't be posting photos of it. I've deleted my Tumblr, I've closed all of my inboxes and I've made sure that all my settings have the filters turned firmly on. My social media presence will now be predominantly work related and I won't be scrolling through the comments when it's not. The difference this has made on my mental health in just the last few weeks has been monumental. It's brought me so much comfort to fence in a portion of my life that is solely for me and my inner circle of loved ones.

You may wonder why I don't just tear it all down. Delete every app on my phone, every profile and tweet and get rid of the source of my problems. But social media isn't the source of my, or anyone's, issues, I don't believe. It's how we interact with it and how we interact with other people interacting with it. My need to be liked, to people-please and be understood and my inability to let go of other people's opinions of me would all still remain and affect my life if I never set foot on a social networking site again. They'd simply manifest themselves in different ways and those things would still need to be fixed. I'm better off working on myself and setting stronger, better boundaries so that I can enjoy social media and use it to my advantage without giving it and it's users too much power over me and my life. So...that's the plan.