What I Learned | Winter 2024

I’m a bit late writing this post, but I’ll get more into that down below. So, here goes, but first, a little housekeeping.

These posts were originally structured using a list format, following the “What I Learned” creator, Emily P. Freeman. She stopped writing these posts and since then, I’ve felt moved to change how I do these. The list format doesn’t work all the time. Some quarters, I’ll sit down and look at my handwritten list, or lack thereof, and struggle to find something to write. The truth is, some months you don’t learn anything new. You’re just struggling to keep your head above water.

Now I’m a Sagittarius. I strive to find a lesson in everything, but some lessons can’t be shared for mass consumption. They don’t translate well, which is why I’m switching things up. This and future posts are going to look a bit different. Some days, this might be an essay about one thing that I’ve learned, and others, there might be a couple of paragraphs about several lessons. Life is going to dictate the structure moving forward instead of me trying to fit life into little categories.

So, with that said, here’s what I learned this winter.

I’m ending my relationship with social media … for now.

This week, I decided to delete social media apps from my phone. I’ve been contemplating this for a long while, mainly because I don’t use Facebook for anything other than wishing friends “happy birthday,” and Instagram has grown increasingly opportunistic since the start of the pandemic, with everyone pushing their subscriptions and memberships, or hawking Amazon favorites, or selling their courses and fix-it-all opportunities. Let’s face it, a girl can only watch so many videos of people putting decorative ice in fancy plastic containers and organizing their refrigerators and kitchen cabinets with wasteful storage solutions before starting to feel worthless. I wish we could go back to the days of using these platforms to connect with friends, but alas.

Aside from the mental health detriment, social media is distracting to those who want to get stuff done. I’ve spent too much time scrolling and living vicariously through someone else’s life than actually living my own. I have work that I want to do, that is important to me, and wasting even one minute on an app that is designed to keep us glued to our screen is a minute too long.

This morning, there was a massive outage that took down all Meta entities, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, as well as other major platforms like Google and its products, for hours. I couldn’t help but think about those who have built businesses on these platforms, relying on the good graces of Zuck and other billionaire CEOs for those enterprises to succeed. While that’s true of the internet, in general, I don’t want to rely on these companies for financial security or entertainment.

This outage also reminded me of the days before the internet was at our fingertips. I grew up in a time when cellular phones weren’t practical to carry around and we didn’t get to see what someone we knew from ten years ago ate for dinner tonight or how their kid did at the soccer game/recital/et cetera. We kept in touch with our close friends in person or with a phone call. The introvert in me is grateful for the invention of email because it saves me from a lot of face-to-face meetups, but that’s all we had. Our circles were limited to those people we saw every day or made an effort to keep in touch with.

I don’t know how long this social media fast will go on. In my heart, I am hoping for a good chunk of time between now and the day that I sign back on. Hopefully, by then, I’ll have the wherewithal to cut connections with the people I don’t need to be watching and the ability to set some strict boundaries. Until then, I’ll be happy with my unsocial life.

Growth often requires you to pull back before you bloom.

This video (which is pretty cool by itself) reminded me that to bloom fully, you sometimes need to draw back in many areas of your life, hence the above paragraph. And yes, I see the irony in directing you to an Instagram reel after sharing that I’m cutting ties with said platform. But the message is what I appreciated—the importance of scaling back in areas that are hindering your growth to focus on what’s important to you so that you can grow. Can I get an amen?

It’s confirmed: I am autistic.

I’ve suspected for a long time, and with the help of some resources shared by a connection who is studying later-life diagnosis in women, I took four of the recommended self-assessment exams and each of them marked me off the charts as neurodivergent. What does this mean? Nothing, really. Confirmation of what I knew to be true. I’ve read that a formal (psych professional-initiated) diagnosis isn’t necessary unless seeking accommodations at work or school. What’s exciting is that one of the self-assessments, the RAADS-R, an 80-point questionnaire, is being certified as a reliable tool in official diagnosis, according to this peer-reviewed study.

I’m not someone who cares much about labels, but it is a relief to be able to link some of the characteristics and things that I have done since childhood to a source. My brain has always processed things differently than most of the people I’ve been close to. I have hypersensitivity to pretty much all stimuli—light, noise, smell, temperature, touch. I can read a paragraph fifty times and not understand it, but listen to it with a text reader and get it the first time. I would rather die than find myself in social situations with people I don’t know well. I realize that not all “symptoms” are going to be true for every person who is on the neurodivergent spectrum, but for me, this links the quirks that others found weird (and sometimes endearing) to something concrete.

I’m still processing all of this and probably will be for a long time, but I’m happy to know that I’m not, in fact, weird. Or maybe I still am, and I’m cool with that. Either way, this is bound to be a big research project this year.