Past The Shallow

    It has been a second since I've shared anything on here. I just couldn't find my voice for so many things I want to say. There is always something that I can't quite articulate, but I found one thing that I have enough words for that I hope will have meaning to someone else. 

    I took this picture a year and a half ago in Northern California. The sea has always been fascinating to me and I love the beach. The sound of the waves and the sand in my toes, there is just nothing like it. As I was looking back on my social media in my pictures I came across it and started thinking. The water is so different up by the rocks where it isn't as deep. Further out past the shore it is smooth and endless. As much as I love the ocean, I am often terrified of the immensity and vastness of it. The unknown is scary and as much as I love the water, I am too scared to explore it much further than this. At this particular beach, getting into the water would be dangerous and stupid because of the tides, crashing waves, and jagged rocks. And yet I still chose to stand there, admiring the deep water in the distance and getting splashed from the coming waves. Then I realized something. In a world so vast and endless, how much time do we spend getting caught up in the tides, crashing waves, and jagged edges of the shore instead of exploring the deep? Do we ever get past the shallow?

    Social Media can be such a blessing and a way for connection and communication that is obviously unprecedented. It can also be a trap, a black hole, a trigger, a place for lies. I will be the first to admit that I definitely find myself obsessing over stupid things that I feel encouraged to worry about because of something I saw on social media and though I love getting to stay connected with others that I don't get to see often, it has become a much bigger place for comparison than my immediate surroundings ever could. We are constantly bombarded with images, messages, and ideas. There are both good and bad to these influences. However, the bad seems to have the greatest effect on us. Why is that? Why are we so consumed with what makes us feel inferior, unintelligent, ignorant? In one of my favorite books called "Beyond Beautiful" by Anuschka Rees, she says "social media is a self-curated bubble. You create your own bubble and then you live in it." Why in the world would we create a bubble that makes us feel like crap?? As ridiculous as it sounds, we do it every single day. We reinforce it. We participate in it.

    People are shallow when it comes to what they allow people to see of their lives. They are professional editors of the "real thing." They know how to pose, how to use lighting to their advantage, how to include only the good. Obviously, I can't speak for every single account or post because there are many who are moving away from toxic positivity. But we have so much work to do. That shallow area is dangerous for self-worth, values, religious beliefs, political views, our impressionable youth, comparison, etc. When we get stuck there we are hit on all sides by those crashing waves, pulled into the tides that drag us down deeper, often injuring us with those sharp rocks. And yet we stay. How do we get past the shallow? How do we find the deep?

    Within the last year, I have had some time on my hands and I know we all have. There were days when the media I allowed myself to see really got me down. I felt insecure, inadequate like I wasn't using the plethora of time I had to really organize my life and get my crap together like everyone else seemed to be. Then one day I decided that I was going to unfollow, unsubscribe, unfriend anyone and anything that made me feel that way. It was a social media detox of massive proportions. It honestly probably took me an entire day to clean it all out. It was no easy feat. But, when I finished I felt like I had just taken out the trash of my entire life. Like I had literally gone through all of my belongings and gotten rid of the things that no longer served me. Accounts and people with messages and images I used to subconsciously internalize were gone. There were days when I would go look for them, but eventually, the urge went away because I didn't care. For me, it was specifically the women that would post obsessively about their bodies and fitness progress, their diet journals and tips, their life coaching tools to "out-happy the bad days", their insistence that cutting out sugar or carbs or any kind of indulgence would make me feel better about myself. It was crap and I knew it, but I felt like I was always strong enough to keep it from affecting me. The truth was obvious and as soon as I no longer saw them the second I opened up my phone, things started to change for me. 

    Obviously, this isn't the end-all-be-all, but it is such a good step to appreciating your life for what it is and yourself for what YOU are. Who cares about the people that feel happier when they don't eat that cookie? Who cares about the people who can find time to organize their entire house, all while their 5 kids practice their instruments? Who cares about the negativity and anger that just brings you down? WHO CARES?? I'm gonna tell you right now that you shouldn't. Don't give a second more of your time to anyone or anything that makes you feel less than you truly are. Life is hard enough and we don't have time to make it harder on ourselves through the thief of joy that is comparison. The shallow may seem more appealing. It may look like a happy place to be and everything is sunshine and smiles. We all know that's a lie and the true happy place is where we can live our truth. Where we can have our messy houses, our pajama days, our ice cream nights, our walk to the mailbox exercises. When we let people see past that surface level, we invite them into the deep vastness of the human existence. We allow ourselves to truly experience it. 

    Christ walked on top of the raging sea. He didn't let it consume him, the tides couldn't pull Him, He invites us to walk on top of it with Him. To leave the torments and dangers and fears below us to walk into the stillness and endlessness of His love. He is not in the shallow, he is in the deep where there is learning, unknown, differences, and realness. Where we can be genuine, loved, and accepted for all that we are.

    Some ideas to exercise your power to unfollow:

• Accounts that make you feel bad about your body or your life
• Attractive people that you follow for literally no reason other than to look at them
• People you follow for motivation to change something about the way you look
• Fitness accounts that promote exercise as a means to manage how your body looks rather than how it feels
• Food accounts that you follow as a motivation to restrict or monitor your eating
• Beauty accounts that focus on using makeup and other beauty products to improve the way you look, rather than the creativity and self-care aspect of it
• Fashion accounts that value outfits that look on-trend, appropriate, or flattering instead of promoting fashion as a way to express yourself and have fun
• Accounts that rate, compare, or scrutinize men and women
• Accounts that otherwise promote the message that beauty equals worth
• Companies that aren't showing any efforts to represent people of different shapes, ages, and ethnicities in their ads

-Kami