It's an extreme sport to be human

I’ve been on social media break for the past month now. But I started to open Twitter again lately from the web, as I unintalled most social media apps from my phone for the time being. Then I found this tweet today and I should say that it’s very reassuring to find something that is so relatable to me right now.

I somehow have a notion that social media is a place for positivity. It’s a place where people share their happiness so I tend to stay away from it when I don’t have any positive thing that I can share to the world. But the reality is, life isn’t always sunshine and rainbow. We, humans, are not immune of negative feelings and we don’t need to repress ourlseves whenever that feeling came to us.

When I think about it, the reason I’m not comfortable to share things outside of positivity on social media is probably because I don’t consider it as a safe place for me to be vulnerable. Maybe it’s just a matter of preference. I always find my blog to be the best place to go back and to seek consolation. But I just realized recently that it’s also such an isolated bubble. So I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s ok to be vulnerable in a more public space that still feels comfortable for me. Of course, there’s no right or wrong on this matter. We just need to find which one is more helpful for us at the moment.

I find that whenever I feel down, I always need time to process what I’m feeling on my own. And that is usually a very depressing and dark time as I force myself to face my own emotion. But I find it necessary for me to be able to understand what I’m feeling and let the feeling to sink in. I want to honor the emotion and give it a proper time to exist no matter how bitter it is. That is basically what I described on my previous post. Now that I slowly feel better and ready to move on, I find it helpful to go back to my hobbies. So I’ve been playing with my guitars and toying with watercolor recently. I also feel more social, so I started to open myself up to talk to friends and hence, the conversation about social media that I talked about above.

Then again, if we come back to the topic of positive or negative feelings, it’s such an unfair categorization for our emotion if we think about it. Someone just enlighten me recently that positive or negative are just label that human invented. And most of us came to the world with an already built-in socio construct that many people recognized as the norm. So we just kind of follow it by the rule unconsiously.

But feelings are just feelings. It’s a natural reaction as a consequence of what we experienced. And essentially, we can’t really choose what to experience from our life. So in the end, what we can do is just to keep going no matter what we feel about this life. Of course, we can still choose what to react in a given situation, just like what Victor Frankl mentioned in his book, Man’s search for meaning. Although I would say that it become very hard to do in a difficult time.

More and more, I feel like I could resonate to what Aurora (a Norway artist) mentioned in a few of her interviews. She said that “it’s an extreme sport to be human.” And I feel like I can finally fully grasp what it means now.

Photo by Jukan Tateisi on Unsplash