Digital Dipshittery vs Magic IRL

Damn my digital footprint is a proper mess.

I own and manage 17 domains and 9 active (this is a relative term… some I only update biennially) websites. Don’t even get me started on the social media clusterfuckery I have drowned myself in over the years. Far out.

Taking a FB break on my personal page as I scrolled through all morning and landed on NONE news from people I actually know or care about. My feed is chocked full of advertisements and paid content and that’s not what I signed up for. I signed up to see what my cousin Anne in Ottawa is wearing while she gets her bake on.

Social media mostly sucks these days. I like being left alone. I cherish my quiet but meaningful little life and my close and trusted friendships. I like real life stuff like dinners, travel, laughter and showing a bunch of lovely people the farm at our Kiwi wedding earlier this month. Granted, I was in bed by 9pm that evening while the party carried on by the bonfire until the wee small hours without me. I liked that it happened and I LOVED the vibe and the joy that each and every guest carried up the hill with them.

Procrastination Stations! Temporarily Homeless but far from Hopeless

Today I should be packing up to put our whole house in storage while we find suitable accommodation as my ex husbands’ new wife doesn’t want us living in the former family home. So one week before moving in, after months of negotiation and attempting to save his sorry ass by paying market rent on a place he has not yet cleared out for sale or rent, he rang my new husband and I to tell us we had to fuck off. Bit of a blessing in disguise, despite being a HUGE inconvenience. The big kids now refuse to go back to their father’s house, and I gotta say I don’t blame them. Love that they are brave and feel safe in the culture we’ve built, but it means the 50/50 custody freedom we so thoroughly enjoyed just isn’t on the table right now. We have all grown much closer and happier through the drama. Just hope we can find a house soon as being nomadic would be fine if it was just us, but with four kids and two cats the uncertainty is a bit unbearable, but we will prevail!

So today, between packing, I have been doing other things including creating content because that is the magic of raging ADHD.

Looking through my life over the last couple of decades of digital content I was triggered more than a bit by all the care, resource and enthusiasm I have chucked away on dipshits, cowards and opportunistic con artists over the years. It’s not bitterness or shame or a desire for revenge that is triggered though. It is a heightened and now profound lack of fucks that is triggered.

Here’s the thing about most things. You can’t control them. Here’s the thing about most, perhaps ALL people. You can’t change them. And here’s the thing about life. It’s not often fair, but there’s always a lesson to be learned.

You Are In Control

Here’s another thing that I really hope you let sink in as you read it: Sometimes you just gotta let shit go.

I’ve been having a grand old time clearing out my social media and networks over the past three years. I’ve all but disappeared to most people. This was necessary after being painfully and dangerously accessible for years. I always thought that I could kill any badness with kindness. I thought I could slay dragons and demons with enthusiasm and honesty. Boy was I an idiot. I made it almost impossible for so many people not to shit all over me. I gave everyone an all access pass to me for years and asked for, and received, very little in return. The target on my back was massive and I gave everyone plenty of ammunition to shoot me with. Even some perfectly nice people have proper pissed me off through cowardice or dumbfuckery over the years. So. Now I live a lovely quiet little life and let most things go. I’m not mad or sad. I am really glad I get to be the happy little budding banana farmer I am.

My fundamental needs are met, and I get to live a meaningful life that includes cleaning toilets and washing windows on the farm between guests. I fucking love it. I don’t have to deal with too many people, and Damon and I can be infinitely particular about those we do work with. And we are. Very picky and incredibly appreciative of our true friends.

You Gotta Choose or You’ll Lose it All

Many people, including the me that I was, had or have messed up ideas about control. I thought that pushing through, holding on, hustling and working meant I’d be able to keep juggling chainsaws unharmed.

Nope.

There’s a finite amount of anything and everything we all get and nothing we strive for or choose comes for free.

If you want a kick ass personal brand or career, that’ll probably cost you your privacy. If you want to have an amazing social life, you might find yourself out of steam for busting through that glass ceiling come Monday morning. Perhaps you crave a happy home life and well adjusted kids? Welp, get in that mini-van and ferry those parasites around and forget about fitting in the gym time or weekly wines with your bestie. Everything costs something, nobody on earth can or does have it all.

The bullshit that we can have it all has been spoon fed to us along with other untrue pipe dreams such as “the American Dream” or “Good Vibes Only”.

Control Freak vs Happy Geek

I need to begin to tie some of this together.

If I ask myself what I have mostly let go of in the past few years and what has seen me move from being an unhappy OTT control freak to a happy farm geek it is the following:

• Unsatisfying or one sided relationships
• worrying about what other people think
• craving validation
• pushing shit up hill and/or sticking with stuff that’s clearly not working

So if you have made it this far, I really want to send a solid shoutout to the power of trusting, prioritising and looking after yourself. Then you won’t have to spend so much time and energy trying to control the things over which you have no control.

Manage you. Take care of you. Say no when you don’t wanna go. Say yes to things that make you feel blessed and block and remove people and things that consistently cause you distress.

Life is messy. You gotta decide what you want from it and hold fast to those dreams. Build them. Nurture them. Try not to get distracted by shiny veneers or the pursuit of a “perfect” family or social circle, sometimes even family has to go. Kicked my biological mother for touch years ago and have been happy and healing from her tyranny ever since. Shed hundreds of “friends” from social media and real life and I will continue to clean that shit out like a fucking boss. Let go of keeping up with the Joneses or big fat pay packets in a job that will destroy your soul. You know what makes you truly happy and this is your only life to go after it.

So do the stuff you gotta or wanna do and let things you can’t control pass on through.

Squeezing things tighter doesn’t make you lighter. Trust me. You deserve to let some things (and people) go.

Thanks for reading.