Did I Say Too Much?

There are some weeks that I struggle when I sit down to pause and write my blog. I have tried setting a routine, but it doesn’t work. A routine feels forced, and it fails to tick any of the boxes it is supposed to. Which is rather frustrating, using a polite phrase. Luckily, it’s not often that late Tuesday arrives, and I am still drawing a blank. More often than not, I have some incomplete ideas that I then throw at the wall and see if they stick.

One of the biggest hurdles is not deciding a theme to write about. I often have more than one idea of a topic, instead where I struggle the most is how personal (or not) I want to be within that context. This week, I have been inspired by the book “Trauma Industrial Complex” by Darren McGarvey. The book’s themes of the consequences of choosing to share your personal story in the first place, and then how the narratives we construct interact with how we perceive and are perceived by the world, are exactly the themes I find myself confronted with weekly.

Choosing what to share online feels particularly pertinent in the existing cultural context; however, having been on the internet since before the World Wide Web officially existed, I have gained an awareness that I learned early that the internet was real life with real consequences and that the best approach was to only share information I would be happy to be printed in a newspaper. Early on, my decision to share my mental health battles no doubt led to oversharing, but it also did good. I am super lucky that people chose to share the impact of my stories, and I am grateful to everyone who allowed me to be part of their journey. I am also fortunate that this decision did not bite back like others I am not mentioning, eventually did.

The downside of this, and in making online friends more generally, is that not everything has a happy ending. You lose people that you may never have met in person, but with whom you have formed deep personal bonds, and that is a unique grief for which nothing has prepared us. I am not sure we are any more ready in the era of social media, either.

I feel this experience helped when sharing my poetry online. I was greener than fresh grass back in 2022, but I did know that my written word therapy sessions could only be shared with guardrails. My life has changed in positive ways that were unimaginable to me back then. I could say that I have something to lose, but it is more important than that. I am concerned with the people who would be “collateral damage” when an attempt to destroy anything I had built was made. I am not being paranoid; I have receipts.

I only mention this here because it is the single biggest determining factor of what I write and share. Being my friend should not mean being in the line of fire for someone’s malice. If you are my friend, then the likelihood is you know more about my low lights than anything else. I do, therefore, consider how my weekly reflection will land. This is balanced with the importance of internal narration to my experience of life.

I am still learning how my neurodivergence intersects with my life, how my strokes and head injuries interact, as well as how my disability and chronic illness mediate everything along the way. It is a lot to be getting on with. And I haven’t even started to mix in how either regular human or addiction related stuff works with any of that either.

When I write reflectively, I want to be sharing all those things. If I am writing any sort of hero’s journey, then it is in real time, and I have no idea if I will get to the montage, let alone the happy ending. So far, no news of a sequel either. Who would play me in the remake, I wonder?

This week I started out writing about Victimhood because, as a result of Darren’s book, that theme kept coming to mind. However, I never want to be the victim in the story; I want to be the survivor. In my mind, to be the victim is the beaten, defeated position, at the lowest point of the hero’s journey. I think I am strongly opposed to taking the identity of victim because aged 29 I was beaten up by a group of thirteen men and kicked on the ground for about seven and a half minutes. The CCTV in the hotel where I was working night shift reception had the cameras set to monitor for staff theft, and didn’t get clear face footage. My back has hurt every day since.

I can choose to be a victim of that; there were and have been considerable negative consequences and I still live with the damage they did. But with that I have also gone on to do things I was told were impossible more than once. I created my own hero’s journey complete with the montage.

Without more oversharing, Darren hit a nerve, a very good nerve. He made me aware that I have huge anxiety over the consequences of what I say and write, not necessarily a bad thing. The book helped me see that my dedication to not being a victim, to pursuing empowerment from within by telling myself what I call the “Rocky Narrative,” is a positive one (with its own perils, of course). I am constantly looking for sources of external validation; I blame my anxiety. I do love external validation and social proof, probably a bit more than is healthy (my metrics crisis springs to mind!).

Which brings me back to thinking, “Did I say too much? Did I say enough?” Is it just lyrics stuck in my head, or am I digging a hole future me will come to regret? It helps me to know that other people struggle with the same things as me, and that I can do it without five hacks, a breakthrough app or something that feels illegal to know. So, I hope that someone finds this helpful without me having one more coaching spot or a course that you can download.

Until next week, only share what you would be happy to see in Hello Magazine (apparently), and keep on – keeping on.