My Husband Went Viral on Instagram & I Lost My Mind
The gift of getting triggered AF. ✨
When I was a little girl, I would sob to my mom about the color of my eyes. I would wail and heave in forlorn longing as only a small child can about the genetic hand I’d been dealt. We could never quite figure it out—this desperate angst in my heart to have blue eyes instead of brown ones—nor could we understand the disproportion of my sadness. I was convinced my life would be miraculously wonderful if my eyes were stunning, bright blue or captivating emerald green.
The color I could never have offered a promise:
If I were just …
If this one thing could change, I would be alright. Sometimes, I still wish my eyes were blue, but only in the glancing, half-hearted way I wish a day was sunny instead of cloudy or that the takeout food was warmer so I didn’t need to microwave it. In other words, it is now in proportion to itself.
I know at some point, as a child of a tumultuous divorce, I latched onto something tangible to encompass the sea of aching within me. Aching for control, aching for stability, for something my sweet little mind had no words for yet, undeveloped as my prefrontal cortex was. The capacity for metacognition (thank you,
for this elegant description) doesn’t begin until the age of 5 or 6. Before that, all of us are min-miasmas of delta and theta brainwaves, our subconscious minds wildly open to the sensations and stimuli of the external world.There are no words to describe whatever this is in me because it enmeshed itself at a time when I had no words.
“It’s always the things you can’t see or hold that cause the most devastating kind of destruction.”
All my words are approximations of this thing entangled with itself and whatever external thing I use to represent it. First, it was blue eyes; then it was all the things: alcohol, drugs, thinness, success, money, weight, Instagram, being known, getting barreled, being a better writer, being funny, being pretty, being smart/ brave/interesting/ creative enough. These smoke signals have drawn me toward the pursuit of themselves—to distract me from what’s been burning below—all my life.
So, what does this have to do with my husband going viral on Instagram?
Several weeks ago, my husband, Devin—an incredibly talented automotive mechanic and all-around wonderful person—who, in a nutshell, builds really cool trucks, went viral and has gone viral several times over on social media.
And I was, in a nutshell, triggered A. fuckin’. F.
I spiraled for days, alternating between bouts of clarity at the silliness of this situation and murky self-pitying despair. Why can’t I be special? What’s wrong with me? I was hungry for attention and ravenous for proof that I, too, was worthy and valuable, believing that:
If I were just …
If I just had …
If I was …
If, if, if, then I would be.
This is the beauty of having your oldest, deepest, most hidden wound brought to the surface.
“The wall that protects you imprisons you.”
Tony Robbins
I reached a point of being so fed up with this feeling—so impossibly bored, if we’re being honest—that I decided to gear down, quit doing my metacognitive cartwheels about how it started or why I feel this way or positive affirmation-ing myself through it, and figure this shit out.
I knew what recovering looks like—the liminal space between understanding what you need to do and doing the opposite—and that I had three choices:
1. Keep focusing on the nonsense, driving myself and the people I love crazy, and letting life pass me by.
2. Half-heartedly continue battling the smoke.
3. Stay in it and walk head-on into the fire.
I chose option three and (in hindsight) placed myself in spiritual boot camp.
Ten days off social media.
Tony Robbins’ Time to Rise 2024 Summit.
(If you’ve been to one of his events, you know that he asks the audience to jump, shout, and wave their arms in the air. I jumped and shouted to a recording—not even the live video—because I wasn’t messing around anymore.
Listening to Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself in less than a week. (I took notes, dear reader.)
Nightly meditation.
Crying, writing, FaceTiming, and messy middling my way through.
I stayed in it because I knew this addiction to self-loathing and comparison is the root from which everything else grows.
I stayed in it because healing is an arrival but never a destination.
I stayed in it because I knew it was happening for me, not to me.
My husband going viral on Instagram sounds like an utterly ridiculous reason to lose my mind.
It one thousand percent is.
Yet it was what I needed to see through the veil of lies and get to the core of it all, the fire of learned low self-esteem and self-obsessed comparisons for the sake of things I don’t. even. care. about. I don’t care about going viral on social media or being terrifyingly skinny; I don’t care about those things.
I care about what I thought those things would give me: self-love, belonging, self-esteem, connection, importance, empowerment.
Yet those things? They’re already here. They’ve been here all along.
Before these last few weeks, I could get away with fooling myself. The comparisons were quieter; the behaviors weren’t as destructive as my previous addictions. This addiction wrought an internal havoc I’d become so accustomed to that I didn’t realize how bad it was until something like my husband going viral on Instagram triggered it enough for me to see how much I still had left to heal.
What I care about is loving myself and loving people. And writing. And being a fabulous partner, daughter, friend, and entrepreneur. And being nice to people. And moving my body. And feeling the sun on my face. And creating. And seeing a rainbow while I surf. And playing my ukulele while singing off-key and strumming off-beat. And watching the sun rising over the mountains. And helping people. And, and, and …
Almost three weeks (or twenty years, give or take) later, I’m on the other side of something, witnessing the wisps of an extinguishing fire.
Devin and I are sitting on the couch, and he shows me his Instagram account.
I am just a person looking at a screen without the biting shame, shaky breathing, and racing thoughts of what ifs or why nots. The numbers are massive, in the tens and hundreds of thousands. We laugh at the funny comments, raise our eyebrows at the strange ones, and giggle at the time we live in. I don’t feel shame, envy, guilt, or devastation. Devin walks our dog while I shower and prepare to meditate.
This is the gift of my breaking point. On the other side of breaking is breaking through to something deeper and more alive than before so that when the haze clears, and all that’s left is ashes, there I’ll be.
Standing there, alive to myself.
Alive to Love.
Alive to Freedom.
Alive to Presence.
Alive to Gratitude.
Alive to Myself.
‘the fire of learned low self-esteem and self-obsessed comparisons for the sake of things I don’t. even. care. about.’
Yeah, I can relate to this. It just shows how irrational our thoughts can be.
The way to overcome such problems is to go deep within ourselves and determine the root causes and address them.
Probably better to not go viral at all than going viral BECAUSE of losing your mind! 😆
Thank you for writing this.