MySpace wasn’t even a high school thing. It started the month I started bible college. It was in my early 20s that I reluctantly switched to the Facebook “fad.” As a youth pastor, social media became a central way of communicating and connecting with students. It was also an easy distraction to fall into. For someone like me, with my impulsive all-in-all-out mentality that also plays nicely with addiction, a digital world where I can program dopamine spikes with crafted bull crap was perfect.

Vulnerability vs. Validation

Facebook and Instagram helped cover up my internal mess with isolated truths and moments during my drinking. It was a way of faking meaning and connection while keeping a safe distance, something I always needed to do. While in Moscow, ID, I was introduced to vulnerability through Daring Greatly (amazon link). It wrecked me. I could see a problem with me, a problem that went everywhere with me, and wanted to hide everything from everyone. I also finally had handles on my Imposter Syndrome. I was able to start sharing with people I felt like “that” but still had to keep a safe distance, even my wife and best friend. Facebook was ideal for the front of relational meaning without the commitment or any of the real mess that makes it worth it. Social media was “safe” because no one could touch me.

Then sobriety came. I was on it and doing things and it was okay at the beginning. There was still a lot I had to work through but I was at least sober and doing the work. Then some “stuff” happened at about 6 months of sobriety that shook me. It lasted months and I was stuck in it. Center to it all was a relationship that helped me get sober but then the toxicity of it became abusive. I learned a lot and the biggest thing was that I was codependant. I remember my addiction counselor suggesting it but I had to chew on it for a bit until I saw it. Then I saw it. Everywhere.

I tried to rip it all out. I took a few months and it was a focus. It made me incredibly aware of my insecurities and of how much my actions are tainted by them. I was in an early stage of recovery and, well, the post-rehab plan was out the window. A lot of reading happened. I was trying to figure out what a single life looked like for someone like me, a recovering pastor with an overly analytical and empathetic personality who has severe trust issues. In honesty, my physical attraction to others scares me (those who also have this understand it). AA was almost a daily thing and I was fumbling my best with what I had and knew. There was a lot I was trying to change about myself. Social media didn’t feel natural anymore like it was more of a remnant of a shell than it was a real me yet. Eventually, social media got cut out.

Ghosting Social Media

It was around October of 2022 – just stopped posting with no announcement. I’d get on and check from time to time but it was in essence just to scroll from a distance, to keep an eye on y’all. It was like I was making sure I wasn’t missing out or that the world hadn’t stopped. The time that gave to me was nice. There was less to worry about.

After getting off social media, I couldn’t imagine how I would function without giving up that time. There was no endpoint to my hiatus from social media. After some time, I figured a year would be a good point to get back on. As October 2023 approached, I wondered what it would be like or if anything would change. My life wasn’t the same a year before and I was not the same Paule. I didn’t know what this Paule would want to post.

Then October came, a thing here or there was posted and that was about it. It felt weird and unnatural. I wasn’t sure how to share anything. I couldn’t quite find my voice. It was perplexing on some level. I was comfortable speaking in front of people, gabbing, and presenting information. Now, I was just afraid of people. So many layers had already been removed that my fragile Self felt extra exposed, so why expose it more? My insecurities made me question every of my word’s motive and intent. I found myself spinning with the mass’ potential thoughts on how I was living and figuring out reality. To be fair, there is plenty to be critiqued…plenty.

The truth is that I “was” comfortable in front of people and with them in front of me. I was in control, I set the story, I had my appearances, and I was good at it. It’s been a struggle trying to find that again. I could do enough vulnerability to “fake” it. Oh, I wanted it but couldn’t take the medicine regularly. Honesty was enough to come off as honest for long enough to get by. My “self” was in the mix of all that but it was also comfortable speaking from inside of that mess. It was a cage that kept you all out.

Finding My Voice Finally

That changed. My world had continued to be flipped upside down, back to right side up. Vulnerability first and thorough. How to do that with everything else is complicated. My decades of personas and development of their characters were useless now. What I had to say had to stand for me and only me…but how? How could I know what I was saying was from truth and in love? How could I know I wasn’t pretending or putting on a front? How could I know that this time I wasn’t deceiving myself? I was preemptively afraid of those who feel safe behind their screens, refusing to know anything else about a person or their story. I shouldn’t have been at all. Regardless of whether or not I was deserving of criticism and shame, it did not matter. I was a human who existed and I should be able to face people. If criticism, then criticism.

A lot has changed. A lot. My beliefs, personality, practices, habits, etc.
A lot has not changed. My beliefs, personality, practices, habits, etc.

Criticism is not hard to speculate: former pastor, recovering alcoholic, and still in the wreckage of his past. I don’t stop at speculation. It’s a world to live in. I had worked through and changed a lot of things privately, “in secret.” Coming out of the dark with all of that is a bit much – I am already a bit much for people. What had started as a retreat to deal with insecurities became a journey back to find my actual voice and to put out into practice what I only had been working on in “here”. Shame was a part of it, again. Fear of disapproval, what people might think of me as compared to who I was, their judgments of my recovery, and harder ones had to be reprocessed.

A big part of it is I’m out of practice. It doesn’t fit the same way into my life. Mixing social media into a few important priorities, like writing and work, has helped me start finding my voice and navigating those complex, fuzzy pathways of engaging with social media. Trying to practice it in daily life is maybe the hardest one. It’s weird.

Being-in-the-World

Heidegger loved “being-in-the-world” as a trait we humans have and too few think about. We’re all in a world full of other beings who also have perceptions and wills. This “world” isn’t “the world” (or it is depending on what you’re thinking about). This world is the world of humans, of other people and what they perceive, how they relate, and their beliefs. It’s the world humans have made before you arrived. It was already here and you had to play catch up for almost two decades. There is nothing else we know. Our entire existence exists within a world, a world full of beings, a world full of happenings and relationships between things and beings, a world today so interconnected that it’s easy to get lost in it without ever knowing it. We all live in a story we didn’t start writing.

Part of my struggle has been trying to figure out and reorientate myself, my posture, and my practice towards the world. There’s a lot new for me and I feel like a toddler fumbling through things. There were a lot of onion-orge layers that had been operated on or amputated, some transformed and others needing work. Hidden demons are always around when I think maybe I made enough progress.

There’s also my story isn’t my own. There are a lot of people in it. There are sensitive topics that I often am not sensitive enough to, like how I tell the parts of my story that also belong to someone else. There are parts I just don’t remember well, gaps, and inconsistencies. Some parts just won’t come up because of my boundaries. As I’ve been trying to share, I can catch my inner child squelching from imagined shame and jeers of those touched by what I’ve done.

It’s stupid because A.) it’s imagined, in my mind, and 2.) that feeling I get, the time I stew with it, and how it sucks energy and inhibits proactivity is worse objectively in length and severity than just facing people and dealing with the fallout.

Awkward Experimentation

My fear has led to such discontentment. Acting outside of fear is the only legitimate answer to changing perceptions and learning something else. The answer is, for me, to choke and starve off every last bit of shame I have. I have plenty. Let the light shine and deal with what it falls on. I already know it and have been through it plenty – people can catch up if they want. I’m working on expressing myself but, good fudging baby Hitler Smith, words blend between pain, passion, self-hate, acceptance, freedom, delusion, honesty, confidence, and fear. There’s the inch of hope, of light, and of finally having some things I’ve never known humans were meant to have. But it still sucks sometimes.

The times have at least highlighted and defined the area of my shame and fear. I’m getting to know it better often. Monsters we don’t look at get bigger. My monsters need to be stared down for a while before they start to blink. Social media, along with work and life, is going to be an experiment. It’s awkward making sure social media doesn’t become what it was: a replacement for an authentic and meaningful existence.