Know Yourself Before You Scroll

Grow your own roots before you allow others to form them for you. Conditioning takes place when we are young and then we grow up and we can’t always differentiate what our own thoughts and beliefs are and the ones that were woven into our psyche as we were evolving from babies to children to adults. 

There is never a more prevalent time than now to make sure you have rooted and know yourself. Where you have taken some time away from the opinion of others and formed some of your own about you. And to do this before you pick up your phone and scroll because that screen that is full to the brim is bursting with other people’s ideas, AI renditions, algorithms created by billion dollar industries and people selling something to you, whether it is what you should be or what you should buy. 

Either way, if you have are undecided about some core principles and values that are central to you and your nervous system, the scrolling will impact you in ways you will not even be aware of and before you know it, your thoughts and perspectives will be an amalgam of 7 second sound bites created by viral content that is a hodge podge of ideas telling you who you are. 

You will become like a quilted blanket of superimposed personalities none of which are your own. So decide on your own, who you are as far as you can. What you want, what you believe in, what you cherish, who you love, what you are passionate about. Learn to hear your own voice and listen to it and above all learn to love and trust yourself. 

If I was to form myself from my tik tok feed, I would be a married, middle aged perimenopausal woman who should definitely have a dog by now and a couple of kids, love to cook vegan meals and try out a minimalist lifestyle, dress appropriately for my over 40’s age bracket. In my reality I am unmarried, childfree, pescetarian not a lover of cooking but will dabble in it as a way to feed myself, love a bit of maximalism especially when it comes to jewellery, dress more like I did when I was in my trainers and joggers phase as a teenager and now wear that attire to most events and I do not have any pets.

I am passionate about art and words and speaking and sharing with other creatives to follow the scent of their own artistic desires. And I firmly believe that self love is at the root of all our human interactions whether with other humans, money, planet, pets and anything else animate or inanimate. 

The algorithm does not tell me this about myself, the scrolling images keep my only alert to what other people think I should be and how I should be. I don’t want to show you what I am wearing today, because behind a screen I spend most of my time in what I have lovingly named my ‘house clothes’ which only my most loved and dearest non judgemental people get to see me in. But I do want to share what is on my heart and in my head. That is a way more intimate part of me than the clothes that are being worn by my body. 

And if one day I am feeling vulnerable and on shaky ground and I feel unsure of the thoughts in my head and the feelings in my body, it would be the worst time to enter the pixelated screen that I can hold in my hand but is the exact time I would turn to it and like a pile of clothes on a spin cycle in the washing machine, I put myself into the machine and get spun in a million different directions and come out knowing myself less and lacking any depth of deeper understanding about anything. 

I sound like I hate social media and yet I don’t. I enjoy all the ways I get to see how diverse a world we live in and take joy in seeing other people live out such different interactions of life on this planet. I delight in the humour shared and yes I do want to see your dog give you the side eye or hear your child swear unknowingly. But all of this only, when I already feel rooted in myself so I am not swayed by public opinion that I have missed out on something, that I should be doing or being someone or somewhere other than I am. To offer me a FOMO for every aspect of my day and life. 

We want to be knowledgeable about ourselves before we put our lives into the hands of strangers who don’t know us at all.