Christine Gabrièlle

Does anybody else do their best thinking in the shower?

I was thinking recently while taking a shower that there are just way too many voices. It used to be that a person would hear maybe 50 voices in their environment. We're talking about parents, siblings, cousins (maybe), coworkers, partner, children, friends. These are the only people's voices that someone would hear on a regular basis.

But now, with social media, there are thousands upon thousands of voices people hear every day. You've got the preachers, social media influencers, therapists, random people selling stuff in addition to the family, friends, and coworkers. There's always a voice telling us what we should do, what we should buy, who we should be. 

And I think that's part of the reason we're all so frazzled.

I was scrolling through Instagram the other day and I was looking at the posts on somebody's page and there was an ad in the middle of their posts. Now, I've gotten used to the ads and the suggested posts just on my regular feed and in between stories, but now, just looking at one person's page and scrolling through their posts there are ads? It's insane!

Instagram used to be a place where we would post pictures (then videos, then stories) and we would watch content from people we knew, or people would watch our content and we'd just kind of lightly keep up with other people's lives. Then we added in the people who have YouTube channels that we watch, and who we'd like to feel a little more personal with, so we follow them on socials.

But now, everybody is trying to sell us something. Everybody has to start a business. Everybody has to be an entrepreneur. It really is exhausting. And don't get me wrong, I have fallen into the same trap. I'm just tired now.

So, I'm at a point where I have to decide what I want my life to look like, because I'm sick of hearing so many people's voices.

I've already stopped listening to most of the videos people share in their stories and on their feeds that are not created by them. A lot of it is sharing things other people have posted. They think, "oh, this is a good little nugget" and they share it. I do the same thing. But I'm going to stop listening to those. And I'm going to reduce the amount of things I share. Because there are way too many voices and way too many opinions in my head, and I don't need them.

A lot of us have forgotten how to listen to ourselves and listen to our own intuition and listen to our God. We spend so much time listening to other people who are talking about themselves or their families or their friends or their religion or whatever it is, and they're not even talking about us, they're really not even talking to us, but we absorb what they're saying, nonetheless.

So, I've got to figure out what's gonna work best for me. Because I really want to get all these voices out of my head. 

I want to start trusting myself more and not depending on an Instagram quote or meme to express whatever it is I'm feeling, or to validate my experiences. Sometimes these posts are validating feelings we don't even have, but we think we have those feelings because it makes a little bit of sense. We've stopped interrogating what we're actually feeling and have started to accept what strangers on the internet tell us we're feeling. 

I want better for us. I want better for me.

If you're in a similar boat where you're beginning to feel overwhelmed by all the noise, I encourage you (as I encourage myself) to take a step back and figure out what around you needs to be silenced.

And if you've trekked this mountain and have made it to the other side, congratulations.

♥