LIFE BEYOND THE SOCIAL MEDIA MACHINE

Ok… so there was a point early on in my career where I was dubbed country musics “Snap Chat king”.  I know, in hindsight, that’s not a throne I necessarily aspired to sit upon but please read on…I earned this thorny crown by building a massive following sharing literally every aspect of my life. From the moment I woke up, I was singing to a mirrored screen looking back at me.  I dubbed this morning ritual as “Bed Head Jams”…I sang cover songs, my own songs and I would try to perfect every take to the best that I could as the bags under my eyes and my disheveled hair glistened in the morning sunlight. I DID IT!

I had sold my soul to social media machine, I was good at it and damn did it WORK…and honestly, for a while, it was a lot of fun! All of my platforms were growing to millions of followers and my career was really really happening….I could get on the social platforms, do a few posts, promote the living crap out of the music and the songs would climb up the sales charts…it was addicting, it was beneficial and it was well…strange…the pressures of being in this position began to stack up and I felt steam start to seep out of my ears…I was a ticking anxiety time bomb.  I created something from a real and honest place but then set a very unhealthy expectation for myself that I was going to be on social media nonstop, whether I was having a bad day, feeling anxious, broken hearted, you name it, I wasn’t gonna let anything hold me back.  Instead, I would turn on my mini movie set and escape it all while smiling, laughing, singing and burying all the real emotional stuff….eventually I felt like I didn’t recognize the character on the screen mirroring back at me. I felt like I was in an exhausting cage that I locked myself in.  My anxiety was through the roof, I began to have panic attacks and often didn’t feel like myself…Then something deep down in me said, it’s time to drop this show, better yet, it’s time to get drastic…so in 2019, not long before the infamous 2020 shit show, I decided that it was time to get reflective, it was time to shut off the machine, it was time to get a freakin FLIP PHONE! 

Yes you heard that right…I hadn’t had one of these in years!  I tried like hell to get a RAZR but they didn’t sell them any more.  Anywho, I shut it all down, got a Polaroid camera and a journal and decided to feel into what it was like to not be connected to the beastly social media machine.  It took some adjusting…try to find your way around in the iPhone generation without the maps app and you will see