Lifting the Weight of Expectation – Reflections on Social Media

It feels ridiculous to me given my often-vocalized dislike of the detrimental mental and societal impacts of social media usage, my own tendencies towards numbing and addictive behaviors related to screens and given my restrained desire and constrained capacity to create the prolific content apparently needed to trigger the popularity algorithms of most platforms.

So there are two main reasons I’m even embarking on what I am deeming a social experiment. First is that I finally feel as though there is a message of enough significance that I feel called to share with others, and with the help of some amazing advisors, I see potential paths to connecting without majorly contributing to the known harm of unconscious social media usage. Second is that I finally feel as though I have enough self-awareness to use social media and not suffer adverse impacts myself, namely losing my hard-fought sense of peace, purpose, and potency.

In most of my leadership workshops, I generously use alliteration as a tool for remembering mindset shifting practices. I also use this tool for myself regularly, in this case as a way to reframe and filter my social media choices to protect my peace, purpose and potency.

Peace to me is a sense of presence, awareness, and acceptance of emotions arising in each moment. The moment can be full of comfortable emotions, such as joy, wonder, or gratitude. The moment could also contain uncomfortable emotions, such as fear, anger, or resentment. Peace is being okay with both the comfortable and uncomfortable, and having enough awareness to respond consciously versus reacting with shame, blame, defense, or manipulation. Before my social media fast, I was finding that when I was on social media, I became highly triggered, especially by the rise in polarized posts. It was taking so much of my mental and emotional energy to regulate myself to not be reactive that I constantly felt depleted. I am finding now, after a lot of mindfulness-based practices, I am able to more quickly place any potentially triggering content into context, remembering that most people are still operating predominantly from fear and reactivity. I still find my emotions rising at times, but am able to quickly sense my boundaries and honor them, mostly by getting off the screen and practicing self care.

I learned about motives primarily from being a mother to two young boys.  When they were little, I remember posting sweet moments with them or their accomplishments, but after I posted, I usually felt a slight twinge of discomfort.  It wasn’t until after I started my social media fast that I recognized why I felt uncomfortable.  The discomfort was from my motives and impact.  I wanted the people who deeply loved my kids to share in our joy, but not everyone I posted to loved my kids, so why did they need to know?  I also questioned the impact.  By curating my life in this way for those who really didn’t know me and the true messiness of my existence, I was likely propagating a sense of unattainable perfection for others.  So today, I have private group chats with people who truly know and love me, which is where I share my intimate moments.  For the public, though I am committed to vulnerable expression, I am filtering my postings through the lens of purpose, which for me is what will evolve leadership at the intersection of self, soul, and society.

Potency can be seen as having force, strength, power, or ability.  To truly live a purposeful, creative, and vibrant life, requires directing energy towards what matters most.  What I was finding was that it was too easy for me to lose myself in a virtual world, choosing to soothe through numbing addiction to viewing content versus being present in the totality of each day with all its change, ambiguity, and uncertainty.  Because I held so much expectation about “performing” optimally each day in all my varied roles, instead of accepting the impossibility of my expectations, I would use social media to numb myself.  When I went on my fast, I had to start confronting my existential discomfort with not being able to perform all the time.  Through deep introspection and contemplation, I came to appreciate the dynamic nature of my existence, as reflected in this poem Weighted Expectation

Lifting the Weight of Expectation

This one moment is weighted with so much expectation
Move through it most efficiently to get to the next place
Manage it wisely to not waste this limited commodity
Maximize output in it to rate worthiness in productivity
Model spiritual actions to be deemed wise and evolved
Make use of it as preparation for real life in the future
Mute the discomfort of it all through mindless numbing
This weight smothers the potent aliveness of this existence

Lifting the weight of expectation from this one moment
Opens the heart to experience complex nuanced possibilities
Joyful gratitude for the mundane laced with sadness of its finitude
Reverence for the connection to all mixed with the pain of isolation
Loving acceptance of limits sprinkled with glimmers of potential
Playful desire for creativity oscillating with deep desire for rest
Still awareness of the temporal woven with awe for the unknown
This weightlessness liberates the radiant fullness of existence

-Tejal Tarro

So as I embark on engaging in social media, I want to remember that my potency matters, to actually live and feel alive.  I want to balance creating enough content to draw people into this important message on evolving leadership with calibrating my sense of success, knowing that I am not designed for, nor do I want to, produce relentlessly to win some social media algorithm game.  I want to remember that likes and comments may spark momentary rushes of dopamine, but what really sustainably fuels my creativity and vitality is simplicity: enjoying spans of doing nothing, sitting outside and feeling nature, hugging my loved ones, listening to music, moving my body through dance, eating delicious food and writing from what is stirring my soul.