Tag: about me

I Deleted My Facebook For 7 Days

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Ok, so I am definitely straying a bit from my brand with this, BUT I think it is somewhat connected to this suddenly popular travel/nomad lifestyle. Every single person with a social media account should be able to relate.

Welcome to the 21st century! It has become completely normal to have everything including your dirty laundry hung out to dry on the internet. What would be absolutely terrifying to someone in 1901, is now the social norm. In fact, people who aren’t using social media are laughed at, and seldom taken seriously.

I tried something. I deleted my Facebook for 7 days. That’s nothing, I know, but I realized how much of our lives depend on social media now.  Here is what I discovered:

  1. The most common source of all news is Facebook.
  2. A HUGE amount of human interaction nowadays takes place on Facebook.
  3. I had less anxiety and depression and it actually cured a lot of my insecurities for the 7 days I disconnected.
  4. People are more likely to look at their phone than have a conversation with someone sitting across the table, or on the other side of the couch.
  5. Being without social media is lonely.

I was back on Facebook the second my week was over. I of course have some excuses as to why, BUT really none of that matters. One of the things I noticed more than anything was that I felt extremely lonely. I realized that I have isolated myself and my friendships are superficial, because it’s only through a screen. I realized Brandon and I spend more time on our phones looking at a newsfeed than we do talking to each other, doing things together, or just interacting at all.

It’s a catch-22 though. I feel less alone on my social media accounts, but the second all of that is taken away I realize how alone I really am. Everything revolves around taking the best photo to post on Instagram or Facebook. Downloading the newest apps like boomerang, or Tik-Tok to just keep up with everyone else, but is keeping up with everyone else really helping?

Travel blogs and other travel accounts are always so inspirational, and I get how hypocritical this is coming from someone who writes about travel themselves, but it’s also seriously depressing. A lot of people don’t know how to save money traveling and can’t afford to travel due to personal circumstances, and I think that is awful. Everyone should be able to travel. Don’t even get me started on the price of plane tickets, because it’s a rip off.

As a healthcare worker I have noticed 3 things in my short time working in a primary care clinic. Depression is an epidemic. Whether it is related to social media or not, the majority of the population feels inadequate and terrible about themselves and their lives. I can’t help but feel that addiction to social media plays at least a small part in this. Two years ago we were not screening for suicide unless a patient came in for depression or mentioned it during a visit. Today, more and more clinics are starting to screen at every single visit, and you know what? More and more people are being diagnosed with crippling depression and many people have SI (suicidal ideations).

Taking a break from my Facebook account even though it was only for a week, opened my eyes and showed me that there is so much more than just flexing about your life on social media or playing into everyone else doing the same. The truth is, what people post is a very small part of their lives and many people are hiding their sadness behind selfies of themselves and photos of them out partying with friends every night.

This experiment was very personal to me. I have been struggling with my own depression related to my self image as well as some other personal health struggles. I disassociate myself from my friends, my family and my husband frequently. Depression is very real for me and social media is a huge trigger. Seeing everyone else posting happy, perfect family photographs is hard to swallow. There are nights I don’t sleep and days I sleep for over 18 hours. There are days I go without eating and days I eat everything in sight. There are weeks I feel like I can take on the world and weeks I feel like a zombie just going through the motions with no feeling.

Deleting Facebook helped me regroup, rethink my future and look at things in a more positive light. Deleting Facebook for 7 days in no way cured my depression, but it made me feel like there might be a light at the end of the tunnel.

I want to urge everyone to deactivate your Facebook occasionally, even if only for a day here and there. If you don’t want to deactivate you can always delete it off your phone for a while and just spend time with the people around you. Go out on a date with your spouse, go on a cell phone free vacation, go out and see a national or state park, enjoy the outdoors, and find some light in your life that doesn’t come from your cell phone or computer screen. Whatever your insecurities are, whatever triggers your depression or anxiety, taking a break from social media can help you refocus your attention on what matters. Of course, there is also a lot of GOOD that social media has brought and I’m not saying it’s all bad, but there is also definitely nothing wrong with taking a break a few times a year to ensure your sanity. Especially if you are being constantly triggered by everything around you.

If you do not feel safe, or are in a bad place and need help,
Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1-800-273-8255

Click here to donate and help end the fight for life: AFSP.org 
Click here to better understand depression: Helpguide.org

Sunny With a Chance of Tornado?

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In June, one of my best friends had her bachelorette party in Nashville, TN during CMA Fest. Being that the drive to Nashville from my home in Wisconsin is only about 9 hours I thought it would be fun to road trip down to meet everyone at the airport. Our families are close, and most of the mothers of the girls invited also joined us. My mom insisted on driving with me. Since she lives in south jersey, she wanted to spend some quality-time, so we took the road trip together.

The 9 hour drive down to Nashville I did entirely myself. I love my mom but she isn’t the best copilot. By the time we made it to Nashville I was exhausted from working all day and then getting in a car and leaving for Music City.

I like to travel solo or with my husband because I feel that traveling brings a lot of reflection and I like my mind to be quiet to take in whatever is around me. Being in a car or plane can be boring, but I also find it peaceful and gives me a chance to reset and relax. My mom likes to talk. A lot.

For the first 3 hours I am convinced that my mom didn’t stop talking. I made the mistake of stopping at a McDonalds on the way down somewhere in Illinois and introduced my mom to a sugar free vanilla latte. 1. I’m not sure how my mom thought that this drink was so ground breaking and different from every other skinny vanilla latte she ever bought from Starbucks. 2. My mom literally did not know how to order it and I’m not really sure what she thought it was.

Side note: this made her talk even more. even faster. and even louder.

Either way it kept me awake, so after 6 hours of music and my mom talking about I don’t even know what she started to fall asleep and I finally got some quiet time.

The rest of the weekend is basically a blur. I was severely sleep deprived and inebriated at other times. This was definitely not a Tour of Nashville which I have done some in the past and will definitely write another post about it. However, I saw the insides of a lot of bars. Broadway is full of bars owned by country music stars like Jason Aldean, Blake Shelton, John Rich, and more. There’s a Honky Tonk bar that is 3 (or 4?) stories tall where we watched 2 dudes rip their shirts off, fist fight and then get thrown out by security. There’s a mechanical bull, a million rooftop bars, and during CMA Fest there are also a million people.

BUT, I am going to talk about all that another time. For the sake of this post, I want to focus on the road trip back from Nashville to Wisconsin.

On the morning of our drive home it was raining, I was hungover from day drinking for 7 hours the day before, and we had a severe thunderstorm warning. This didn’t phase me. Thunderstorms and severe weather are common in the midwest. We got in our car at 6am and started driving because I was hell bent on getting back to Wisconsin by dinner. We of course had to stop at McDonalds on the way out of town for my mom’s 697th* sugar free vanilla latte of the weekend. (*information was grossly exaggerated).

About 6 miles in we got a severe weather warning followed by a tornado watch. We continued our drive and finally got out of Tennessee and into Kentucky where we ended up stopping at a gas station and KFC to use the bathroom and fill up our tank. “Good, Good Father” by Chris Tomlin came on the radio in the KFC bathroom as I was washing my hands and realized we were still in Kentucky in the Bible Belt. That place is a whole other world.

Exhausted, hungry but craving healthy food, and a little cranky we continued on. So naturally for the next 5 hours we argued about literally nothing in the car, because what else would you expect after a bachelorette 5 day weekend bender with your mom?

The following transpired very quickly and within 10 mins:

The skies opened up and it was a complete downpour. We started talking about how I wanted to be a storm chaser as a kid because I was always fascinated with tornados and I would write school reports on them constantly, but NJ has like 1 tornado per decade so it wasn’t really a good choice. I literally said, “it would be cool to see a tornado today”. Both our phones started to go off, it was a warning for severe thunderstorm which we could see (OBVIOUSLY  Weather Channel, are you even predicting or are you just telling me what is already happening?).

Somehow we started arguing about me wanting her to drive or about how I thought she couldn’t drive well because she can’t see very good, I don’t even know. I do remember getting really worked up and pissed off and we were yelling.

Our phone alarms went off again. I asked my mom to look and see what the warning was. She looked up at me and said “Tornado.” I had her read me the information on where it was because I literally could not see 5 feet in front of me the wind and rain was so awful. She mentioned the highway we were on and the mile markers. We were smack dab in the middle of it’s path. I didn’t want to stay there because there was not shelter and we were in the middle nowhere in southern Illinois surrounded by corn fields. I saw an overpass up ahead and pulled over underneath of it so we could at least see. This rain wrapped fucker of a tornado passed right by us as we sat confused and a little scared under an overpass wondering what we should do.

We called Brandon, my sister, and father almost immediately and none of them seemed to care very much except Brandon who likes storms and tornados as much as I do.

This experience left me with three very important pieces of advice for everyone who takes road trips.

  1. Pay attention to warnings on your phone or the radio when you are road tripping.
  2. Life is short, and one minute you are sipping a sugar free vanilla latte with your mom arguing loudly with each other, and the next your heart is pounding and you are yards away from a tornado.
  3. NEVER say the words “It would be cool to see a tornado today”

This whole experience got me thinking, sometimes my iPhone doesn’t work well without WiFi, what if I hadn’t pulled over because I didn’t know there was a tornado warning? What if I had been listening to my iPod instead of the radio AND my phone notifications didn’t come through? A million scenarios have played in my mind, but luckily everything worked out.

I think it just goes to show, you can never expect a normal anything, including a normal drive home.