Is It Just Me Or… Is It Time To Stand The Fuck Up For Ourselves?

When I was having my massive social media meltdown of 2021 I wrote myself a lot of pep talks.

I wrote affirmations about who I am and why I started. I wrote lists of the parts of being online I still enjoy (connecting with you all being a big one!). I wrote reminders of how much I’d put into building my online space and reasons why I deserved to feel okay being there.

One of the notes just said:

STAND UP FOR YOURSELF.

Truthfully, I’d been rolling over on the internet for a long time.

Somewhere down the line amongst the thousands of comments I lost my spine.

I placed myself in a position of always being wrong and I granted authority to anyone who had an opinion of me. They said who I was – I believed them.

(Even though I’d never met a single one of these fuckers and they didn’t know the first thing about me.)

For so long my instinct has been to accept that I’m the problem, apologise, and try to fix myself. There’s something safer about internalising blame – it feels more controllable that way, like you can do something about it.

But that’s a slippery slope when you’re open to strangers every single day who want somewhere to put their pain. If you’re not careful, you absorb everything.

A lot of this year has felt like growing back a layer of skin between me and the world.

Before, it felt like there was no barrier between what happened out there and what I absorbed as my own fault. I genuinely started to believe that the most enormous problems in the world where my responsibility – and that was compounded by my position online and all the people telling me I should be able to carry more than I could.

And even though I know my position online is a weird one that not everyone has, I have a feeling that a few of you probably relate to absorbing the things around you, and not feeling able to stand up for yourself when someone puts something unreasonable on your shoulders…

It’s taken a lot of time, therapy, medication and remembering who the fuck I am, but I finally feel able to stand up again.

These days when someone comes into my online space and says some ridiculous shit to me that has no basis in reality, I don’t immediately absorb it as truth and start coming up with ways to make myself better. In fact, I do the opposite.

I think to myself: who the fuck are you to be telling me anything about who I am?!

Because when you really get down to it, nobody has the right to tell us who we are, what we should do, how we should feel or what we deserve. Especially not people who have no idea what we’ve been through individually to get to where we are.

It is absurd to bow down to the projections of people who don’t know the first thing about you.

I’m not doing it anymore.

I am getting to know myself, deeply.

I am forgiving myself for times I could have done better.

I am building a healthy barrier between what goes on out there and what I allow to go on inside of my brain.

I am standing the fuck up for myself.

Because of we don’t, who will? We are the only person we’re guaranteed to be with for the rest of our life, how could we not be on our own side?

No more rolling over.

No more absorbing what isn’t ours.

We’ve come too far to let other people barge in and steal our light.

It’s reclaiming time.

Love,

M

💜