SOCIAL MEDIA | ANXIETY | LIFE
Thoughts, Racing at the Speed of Light
Every night it felt like my brain was bursting through my skull. Then I quit social media.
I wondered if a million thoughts were racing through me at lightspeed, each one adding to the pressure that I was feeling inside my head.
A healthy mind would have provided a well-maintained highway on which they could freely traverse, whereas mine felt like it was one of those impossible shapes repeating into itself, causing multiple-thought pile-ups.
Pressure is the best physical description I can use to describe what I was feeling each night.
Several times over the past couple of years I have turned to my girlfriend lying next to me in bed to say, “It feels like my brain is three sizes too big for my skull.”
One of my most common fantasies was simply imagining that all my neural activity would just stop.
I envisioned entering a hyperbolic time chamber or some form of cryostasis, where I could go to sleep for a really long time and wake up feeling finally rejuvenated.
No amount of sleep, however, or any other attempts at rest brought relief.
My nights were restless, and my days fatigued.
The only constant was the pressure inside my head, which seemed to be getting worse.
Not knowing the cause or reason for this pressure, I kept descending into my own anxiety spirals.
I started having strange thoughts about myself and the world during these episodes.
Thoughts that made me wonder if I was going insane or if it was the world around me that was getting crazier, driving my own insanity.
Time continued to pass, and eventually, my girlfriend noticed subtle changes in my behavior.
I was becoming more aloof throughout the day.
My focus was scattered and inconsistent.
If a normal-functioning mind produced trains of thought that made sense, mine had unhinged all the carts from one another, given them their own separate engines, and set them off full steam ahead in every direction along the x-y-z coordinate plane.
My attempts to feel and act “normal” failed, causing my spirals to deepen.
At some point, I had a full-blown public mental breakdown — most likely the result of some part of me dying to scream out to the world what I was going through in the desperate hope that someone else would understand.
I created a series of strange videos and released them to my ~14,000 YouTube subscribers, culminating in a rather embarrassing jumble of nonsense that probably still has some of them worrying about what happened to me.
Even worse, some of them probably felt insulted.
I tried to take the edge off with humor even as I was falling apart, which failed catastrophically.
Note to future self: self-deprecation is only funny if you actually love yourself.
Otherwise, it just makes you look like an arrogant ass.
Seeing that no one else seemed to be understanding what I was going through — the chaos and confusion I was attempting to communicate, rather poorly — I ran away.
I deactivated my YouTube channel, deleted my Twitter and Reddit accounts, and made the decision to detox from social media until my head felt clear.
And if it never feels clear, I told myself, then I’m never going back.
It’s now been a couple of months since my breakdown and my detox, and the difference between my headspace then and now is like night and day.
Maybe, I sometimes think, All those racing thoughts weren’t my own.
Fasting from social media has lent some credence to that idea.
Having been an internet junkie since childhood, I never stepped away from it long enough to learn how to develop a healthy, balanced approach, mindest toward it.
This led to an imbalance— I was too far on the side of caring about what other people thought and too concerned with my digital image.
Maybe one part of my breakdown was an unconscious “lashing out” — a way of forcing a moment of self-sabotage to get me away from the internet for long enough to realize that it doesn’t define me.
At the beginning of my detox, I ruminated on whether or not I had made a gigantic mistake.
I wondered if I should have remained behind — mask on — to keep cranking out content regardless of how the whole endeavor had started to feel so lifeless.
What’s worse is that I remember having promised my subscribers that I’d never stop making videos for them, and failing to live up to that promise made me feel like a fraud, someone who had cheated them.
But a while into my detox, a curious transformation started to take place.
I noticed — however subtly — that some of the pressure that I had been feeling began relieving itself.
This gave me hope.
It allowed me to remember a time when my head didn’t feel so “crammed full” of conflicting thoughts and feelings.
In time, I began to see how my brain had acted like a sponge, absorbing everything it had come into contact with on the internet, without knowing what it was doing.
The result was that whoever “I” was had been buried underneath a cacophonous choir of conflicting voices.
The reaction to my YouTube breakdown had simply revealed that the perceptions other people have of us and who we really are hardly ever in tune.
A person can be seen as one thing, and yet be someone else completely beneath that image.
And it’s almost impossible for any of us to know what they are truly going through, regardless of the face they present to the outside world.
As my mental clarity begins to return, so too is my behavior becoming what it once was. My girlfriend recognizes the person she started dating again.
My habits are starting to change for the better — even if that process is slow right now.
Free from the habitual tendency to scan social media for the latest headlines, opinion pieces, and comment discussions, I’ve never felt more focused.
I suspect that it will take a long time before I feel truly in control of the direction of my life, but at least the hope is now there.
I’m now becoming more and more present with my girlfriend, enjoying my regular, non-internet job more, and having more motivation to do things like exercise and dance.
Maybe the most startling development is that I’m rediscovering the joy of reading books and learning new things.
During my time away from the internet, I began to realize that many of the experiences I had been going through during life were not unique to me.
It had been my own tendency to spiral that had made it seem like I was alone and against the world.
Even some of the stranger feelings I had experienced — such as paranoia and the Truman Show effect — were things that many other people had reported going through.
The more time I spent away from screens, the more it became obvious that I had been “too plugged in.”
Luckily, that addiction is now in the process of dissolving — even as I return to Medium to recommence my writing journey.
I feel liberated, like there’s a whole world that’s been waiting for me to give it the attention it’s so desperately craved — attention that the internet had been soaking up.
From this point on, I think mostly about how to use social media responsibly, as a way to alleviate stress and pain, rather than contribute to it.
Most importantly, I feel life slowing down.
I enjoy cooking more for its own sake, and even my regular rideshare job has started revealing its many joys, such as all the beautiful sights I see coasting the roads and highways of San Diego.
There's still the sensation of a million thoughts in my head, each one yearning for expression, but the practices of journaling and writing allow that internal pressure to vent itself in a way that helps me grow, rather than twisting me up in knots.
What I’ve learned is that my obsession with the internet, follower counts, and my digital image blinded me to the fact that my mind was yearning to be expressed through words first, not fancy images or videos.
And it wants me to get more authentic about my feelings, not run away from them for fear of what others might think.
Perhaps the development that surprises me most, however, is that I feel like I don’t need to return to social media if I don’t want to.
Of course, here I am, writing.
And I plan to go back to YouTube and reconnect with my subscribers as well — the thought no longer scares me!
But taking a break made me realize that there’s a lot more to life than what we say to each other from across the digital divide.
It might even be accurate to say that, for a moment here and there, I’ve felt manic.
As the days roll on, I feel more grateful for the life I already have and the wonderful girlfriend that has believed and supported me through the most difficult parts of my journey.
I’m also becoming more content with the blissful feeling of “emptiness” that — to the best of my ability — describes what it’s like to be perfectly healthy.
As for feeling like a fraud? That feeling is finally retreating as well.
I’ve learned that everyone feels that way.
Especially everyone who manages to “succeed” in ways great or small, and who isn’t prepared for that success.
14,000 subscribers is small when compared to some platforms, but to me, that number felt tremendous.
Now, the belief that my words can make a difference in the world — provided I learn how to use them — guides my thinking.
Rather than continuing to see social media as the villain in my story, I’m starting to think more about how my habits and attitudes determine what I get out of the internet.
Who knows?
Maybe social media doesn’t have to be something that destroys our mental health.
Not if we use it the right way — in a way that helps others know they aren’t alone and that inspires them to meet the challenge of a new day with hope, optimism, and enthusiasm.
These days, I can easily look back at my old self with love and compassion, yet also understand all the ways I was unhealthily holding myself back.
As of right now, I’m feeling ready to jump back into the waters of the digital ether and see what sort of waves I can make.
Perhaps it’s possible that all these thoughts — lightspeed racers that they are— can radiate into the world, dispelling darkness with their light.