Daily musings #601 - Wednesday, 14 September 2022
We all face different personal traumas and pandemics in our lives. And PTSD is not something for just war veterans and soldiers. Trauma is real and each one of us faces things that impact and wound us in different ways - things that we often struggle to dig ourselves out of.
I have a deep fear, extreme anxiety, and aversion to social networks developed in the last few years. Guess that I am not able to handle the information and sensory overload. Not all of it, but most of it.
Just the message indicators and notifications give me pangs. I have not logged into Facebook for two years even though my email notifications informed me that I was wished for my birthday in February last. I know it is rude, but then again I am not able to get myself to log in and send out a few thank you notes. And the Fear of missing out (FOMO) is not allowing me to close or suspend the account.
The worst of all was Slack. I signed up for innumerable conversations and channels and often there are hundreds of messages to read or respond so I just gave up. Totally. Ditto for Twitter. Ditto for Instagram. Snapchat. The list continues.
I do manage to keep a few social networks going. MS-Teams at work. Have to use it. There is no choice. And LinkedIn. This has been instrumental in companies reaching out to me and hiring me, so has been a forced environment to stay in. And recently I have found a few LinkedIn members worth conversing with and dialoguing with. Within my comfort zone.
I had to reach out to some people on Slack to make progress on some of my aspirational next steps and I could not get myself to reach out to them for more than 2 years. Week after week, I would tell myself that this is the week - and I will break my PTSD symptoms and launch/login into Slack. But, I couldn’t. However hard I tried.
That is the challenge with trauma. Why do we have trauma for a few things and do not have for a few other things, no one knows. A rational approach to fear says that there is nothing to fear. After clicking Slack open and logging in might at best take a few minutes including a password reset if I did not remember it. But I couldn’t. And rationality doesn’t help. Or make it easier.
Until today. It is finally time to break free. I talked a few days ago about being accepted to talk at a conference in Warsaw. And it was required to be on Slack to discuss its preparation. And finally, I did it. Got back in. And it took just a minute to break back in. After three years and a lot of trauma… why, I don’t really know and am guessing I am as human as anyone else, flaws, warts and all. But why again all this? If I could explain it, then again I would not be human. And why today? Perhaps a forced siutation to address a need? Just left with questions mostly with not many answers.