a journey to & through public sharing | vulnerability
it feels almost simultaneously like i’m starting something new and returning from a hiatus. a hiatus from what though?
the first one. just opening my laptop and letting it all flow out.
it feels almost simultaneously like i’m starting something new and returning from a hiatus. a hiatus from what though? i guess just simply the act of sharing my thoughts in a public space - ie. online.
i started a journey of vulnerable public sharing somewhere around 2014 when instagram was in it’s early years. i was 16 or so with so much time on my hands, so many thoughts and a pretty much nonexistent social or familial life. i had dropped out of highschool, my mom had just divorced her husband so we were living on our own and my mental health was severely imbalanced, and my physical health too i could add. i found yoga through another social media platform, tumblr. it seemed like a new path of what i now know to be mindfulness, but at the time saw as something mystical and freeing outside of the strict and rigid christian raising i had had up until that point.
yoga and it’s philosophies opened my mind to a whole new world and gave me something ‘positive’ to spend my lonely days on. i put positive in quotation marks because this word seemed to be the thing i clung to in that period of life. i was fairly unaware at this time of the duality of life, of spirituality, of the world, and all i yearned for was positivity. all i wanted was some light to this incredibly dark and dreary time of my life and the awakening i can say i was experiencing (more about that in another post probably). i can say yoga and the paths connected to it was definitely the first door.
so, i decided to make an instagram devoted to posting my journey with yoga. you know, at that time it was less of a thing to do. having only 100 followers, maybe 50 of those people interacting with you through a phone app was very new to me and i felt no pressure. i would post yoga poses, inspirational quotes, participate in yoga challenges with other people that had yoga instagrams, things of that sort.
at some point along that journey i was introduced to this word ‘vulnerability’. i had heard it before of course, but not in the sense that it was being shown to me now. i remember reading somewhere that “vulnerability was a superpower” and i identified with this statement wholeheartedly for a few years before my perspective on it became a bit more intricate and complex. nonetheless, when i tell you i felt like i had nothing to lose at that point in life, i really mean it from the depths of my soul. so, i thought to myself, aiight den let’s see if this vulnerability these, in my eyes, enlightened folks are talking about is really all that powerful. i started to share some deeper things. some that brought relief and some that got me into knots i didn’t intend, but that i would say did ultimately provide freedom in some twisted, uncomfortable way down the line.
and the thing that really did it for me, other than simply having an outlet to get these messy, but not too messy things out of my head, was the being seen. people would respond to the things i said. they would say comforting things or that i inspired them. and not just strangers on the internet, i would run into people from my hometown that told me how inspirational i was for sharing things. the same people who had condemned me for my differences and voted me ‘drama queen’ in the yearbook superlatives. it was nice to have some sense of community online when in my walking life i had next to no one. just a poor, young boyfriend who i piled all these things onto and a few friends i hid these things from. i would say i was practicing vulnerability outside of the internet in other ways but not in one-on-one emotional sharing kinds of ways. obviously some imbalance with that recognition ensued along the way, but let us continue on for now.
so i ran with it. i kept sharing via instagram. again not tooooo messy, because yall, my life had been messy messy. not just mine but the generations before me that were embodied in mine and that i was slowly uncovering as i stepped into adulthood. i kept it just above surface level for a few years before taking it to the next level as i got into my late teenage years. at that point, i was quite in the habit of sharing and rode the waves of oversharing, needing to take social media breaks, craving external validation, all dat stuff.
and here’s where i bring it all back together. i’ve said all this to say i spent years building up a habit of vulnerable sharing online. of figuring out how to break the seal, how to get my thoughts out of my head not only in my journal but into a public space where it could be of inspiration to someone else like others had inspired me, and to not only share the good and the bad of emotions, but also the parts of my life that i find interesting, confusing, human. to let the artist and explorer in me be seen.
“and while i feel most of that deserved to be done in ‘private’, i also acknowledge that i fell out of the habit i worked so hard to build and i’ve been fearful of the work it will take to rebuild it.”
and that, at some point, i stopped doing that. at some point, my sharing and the platforms i use grew and evolved and matured to a level that required me to look at this sharing from new angles. scary and uncomfortable angles. complex and existential angles. and while i feel most of that deserved to be done in ‘private’, i also acknowledge that i fell out of the habit i worked so hard to build and i’ve been fearful of the work it will take to rebuild it.
that fear, while still present in some form, has dissipated. and as i expected, not without diligence and conscious attention. the main points to be looked at being my consistency, self integrity - doing what i say i want to do, not just the thinking but the sustained action, and quite frankly rewiring not only my habitual self, but something more profound than the self. a deeper sense of embodying who i am at this stage in my life.
i’m 26 now. ~10 years have passed since i started sharing my thoughts and ideas in a public space, a whole decade, and oh how grateful i am for the journey. the things i’ve learned. the things i’ve suffered through and risen above. the things i’ve still yet to understand or uncover or give attention to that keep it all flowing.
so here is the start. or rather the continuation. i really appreciate you being here and reading until this point. i’m entering this space with no real expectations but with the intention to share in a space where people give a fuck. where people actually exchange their time and energy for mine on purpose instead of scrolling past in a productivity culture led, algorithm based space. no hate to instagram - some distaste, yeah, a lil shade, fo sho. but, in this step i also intend to share more freely on that app as i use to.
this first one is a lil long. or maybe it’s not. i’m really not sure how this all goes yet but if it resonated with you i hope you’ll subscribe. i’ll be sharing my travel diaries (really excited about this one), some whole food recipes, herbal knowledge, journal prompts, mindfulness, meditations, identity exploration, decolonization, earth work, alternative living, mental health tips, homesteading, my journey both past and present and my general ideas, philosophies and thoughts that won’t appear in the same depth on my other sharing platforms (youtube, instagram). there could be some other things along the way but this is what you can expect as the starting point. thanks yall. peace for now.