Glennon Doyle has said that the way she has stayed sober for over twenty years is writing every day.  Her sister told her to just sit down and write. Write her truth. So, I’m giving that a shot.  I used to write on social media, but that just feels like I’m feeding a giant beast that takes truth, pain, emotion, whatever, and consumes it for its own profit and purpose.  It’s not like I’m getting paid to have my truth exploited.

I used to belong to a very well known fitness company that utilized the social media beast.  Its entire business model was to be, in essence, a parasite, feeding off all of the particles that fell from its mouth to feed itself.  It trained all of its members to offer up every minor detail of one’s life as a sacrifice to this beast.  The food we ate, the pain we endured, the struggles we survived were uploaded on the alter, all in an effort to recruit more people to the cause.  The business encouraged us to connect with our “Why” and share it every single day in new and profound ways.  The beast needed feeding and our offerings, if valuable enough, would bring us the priceless jewels of acceptance and love. 

This business knew that it was recruiting the broken and insecure. It sought out these people who were constantly seeking to fill that void left by one hardship or another: an unloving mother, a broken home, death of a loved one, infertility, body dysmorphia. The traumas were as varied as the people, but there was one truth that held everyone together, we wanted to belong and to be seen. We wanted to be told we had value and were loved.  All we had to do was to believe. 

The belief structure was simple. First, we had to believe we are broken. This is a simple ask because the society we’ve all grown up in installed this belief from the very beginning. The original sin of Eve with the apple, which was fed to us by organized religion, was usurped by marketing gurus who teach us our sin is actually being human. Just by being born we aren’t good enough, not because of some biblical transgression of seeking out knowledge or disobeying a deity, but by not fitting in with the impossible image of perfection. Of course this image is constantly changing depending on what product is being sold at the time, but none of this matters because the sin of not being good enough is the inception point for all future messaging and sales. Belief number one: I am human therefore I suck.

Check.

The second belief in this structure requires just a little more faith. We had to believe that this prophet before us actually cared for our well being. If we could accept that this prophet, despite having a shit ton of money on the line to gain, actually cared about nothing else, but fixing us so we could finally find happiness and love then the rest was easy. But, how the fuck do you convince people that you’re not actually selling something when you are literally asking them to buy something from you? We’re the generation of Saturday morning cartoons. We wrote our Christmas and birthday lists over cereal during commercial breaks. We know how this shit works. We may have bought into the idea that we suck because we’re alive, but we’re smart enough to ask why this shiny thing is better than that other shiny thing before mailing our letters to Santa. No one is asking for socks and books from the big guy when the Barbie Dream House is ripe for the asking. We’re savvy fucking consumers. The books and socks will be there even if we don’t ask for them.

Enter social media the solution to all of the prophet’s hurdles. This company isn’t going to use popups that you can block to tell you that you’re fat and broken. Nope. They use people. IT’S PEOPLE! It’s like the Soylent Green of marketing. Side note, I’ve never actually seen the movie Soylent Green, but I remember seeing Phil Hartman on SNL doing a skit where he just keeps screaming, “Soylent Green! It’s people! It’s people!” For some reason it’s always stuck with me and makes me laugh. Anyhow, yeah, the big smart solution was for this company to send out an army of people to infiltrate our news feeds with pictures of themselves working out and making it rain like low rent white washed hip-hop videos. For anyone those posts didn’t work on, they’d throw up some motivational quote to convince you of their humanity. This is how I was introduced to this religion. Or is it prophet? Fuck. I’ve been mixing metaphors and the image of Phil Hartman is still in my brain as I’m trying to weave this coherent narrative and Ruby won’t stop trying to attack some invisible moth next to my keyboard. Writing means contending with mental and physical cats some days.

Allow me to set the scene for how I was introduced to my personal prophet. Jack was five, Eloise was two, and Jared was working full time while attending law school. I had recently cut off all communication with mother, which is a story for another day. I was an overwhelmed mama with two neurodivergent kiddos, essentially a single parent, attempting to heal a shit ton of unprocessed trauma and toxic coping mechanisms with no real friends or support system. I was depressed, felt incredibly unattractive, lacking in all sense of self worth and identity outside of domestic productivity, and I’m sure just a general joy to be around. Oh, SPOILER ALERT, I also have ADHD, but totally didn’t know it then. I just accepted I was a complete weirdo and failure as a human being on all fronts. So, in an attempt to find connection and be a better mom, I was in a Facebook group for parents looking for support and guidance on how to stop yelling at their kiddos.

This group, called the Don’t Be an Asshole to Your Kiddos Because You Have Unresolved Childhood Trauma and Start Doing the Work to Heal and End Generational Abuse Challenge, or maybe it was something shorter. . .was there to provide a safe space for parents to commiserate and have access to resources because none of us knew what we were doing. We just knew we yelled more than we wanted to at the tiny humans in our lives and really didn’t know why we were total parenting assholes, but really didn’t want to be. This is the group I was routinely baring my soul to, in an attempt to not suck so much or to feel so alone. This is where I met KiKi. Obviously that’s not her real name and for all you know I’m making all of this up and combining a bunch of people into one person, but this is my fucking story and her name is KiKi.

Everyone in the group assumed that the people in our social media haven were like us. It was a private group with rules and Facebook was still in its infancy before finding its true calling as a digital antichrist. Plus, we were all naive and it’s not like this was fucking MySpace. People had to ask to be your friend and not just insert themselves into your space. I’m looking at you Tom. Anyhow, when KiKi showed up in the group with her little confessions about being a shitty mom she was supported and offered advice. People with very little emotional resources shared those resources with her, like with everyone else, because that’s what you do in a support group. You put in the emotional labor when you can because when you need some given its there for you, too.

In retrospect, we all should have known something was funky with KiKi. And not in the fun disco way, but she did talk about singing KungFu Fighting more than anyone else I had ever encountered outside of those dancing hamsters. She would show up in the group and share, “I yelled at my kids because we were late for school and felt bad about it afterwards,” or some other generic story and then was followed up a few hours later with a jubilant post about how randomly working out resolved all of her issues and made her a better mom for the day. But we were all dealing with our own shit and drowning in our own pain. Besides, who the fuck joins a group of people desperate to be better parents where we open up about moments we feel legit shame over in an attempt to sell these broken people some shit? That’s some villainous behavior that even the best masterminds of Gotham would side eye. I can only imagine the look of horror on Harvey Dent/Two-Face’s face if he caught a glimpse of KiKi and her game because as it would turn out. That’s exactly what she fucking did.

There is so much more to this story. Will KiKi be found out for the villain she is? What will our asshole parents in treatment do? Is there a happy ending? You’ll have to tune in for the next installment. My writing time for today is spent. So, be sure to tune in for the next part of our story. Same Bat-Time. Same Bat-Channel.

Sorry. My geek is showing again. It’s like a tail that has a mind of its own. I just can’t keep it tucked in.