Why Do I Hold My Tongue Hostage?

If I had to pinpoint what the most important aspect of my life is other than family, it would easily be my voice. And I’m not talking about my vocals, so to speak, I just mean my ability to express myself. Ever since I was young, I’ve felt like my voice matters & could impact others for the better. I’ve just been on a journey to find the creative medium to express it.

That very journey itself has been what is therapeutic to me. Whether I’m writing a piece, a script, recording a podcast, making music, filming a video, shooting photos, the very process of being creative has gotten me through so much in life. The notes app in my phone is an utter mess of ideas and I wouldn’t have it any other way. It grounds me in strange, yet satisfying way.

But as of late, it’s been getting more & more difficult to get that voice out of me. I’ve been creatively thwarted by trauma & depression and it’s beyond frustrating. Me and my mental health have had a long history of beef, but so far this year, we’ve been having an all out slugfest. I’ve been dealing with high-functioning depression & anxiety all my life, so I’m kind of used to inner turmoil, but the past 12 months for me have put all my tendencies to the test.

The main factor is pretty obviously my grieving process. I keep having to remind myself of this timeframe, but I lost my mom just 7 months ago. At 23 years old, I’m actively trying to reevaluate my entire life; who I am, what I want to do, and where I fit in this world without my mom. But the other side of it, which I don’t talk about often, is the 5 months prior that led to her passing.

She didn’t suddenly transition, it was an unfortunately slow process. With a cancer diagnosis; months of frustrating hospital stays, & treatments that I was there for every single day, it was the most challenging period of my life. She was a single mother & I was raised an only child, so everything fell on my shoulders. I became her full-time at-home caretaker, her medical advocate in the hospital, and the surprisingly most draining aspect of it all: the sole point of communication for our large nucleus of family & friends.

Now I don’t bring all this up to garner any internet sympathy, but really to put into context just how I lost the first aspect of my voice: my ability to communicate.

After 5 months of waking up to a consistent 20-30 unread texts & dozens of phone calls each day, it’s left me with such burnout & PTSD that I literally don’t respond to texts anymore. Whenever I try to answer people, I get triggered back to last fall, when every text exchange I had was time-sensitive & emotional. So when I receive messages now, I get such a visceral reaction of anxiety that I feel the urge to just launch my phone across the room.

This new tendency is nothing that I’m proud of. On the contrary, it feels embarrassing. Like I have people that I genuinely have love for who are sitting in my text inbox from several months ago. I have such kind DM’s from people I didn’t even know cared about me, but its like I literally can’t bring myself to answer them, and I feel a lot of shame in that. It’s most definitely a trauma response, but hey, just not responding is one of the only ways I’m able to maintain at times.

Losing the urge to hit people back was the beginning of my current roadblock. Though I couldn’t answer a text, sharing content and talking on social media was still very much in my wheelhouse. Yet slowly but surely, that voice in me left as well.

Now my radio silence includes my social media presence entirely. I’m not making content, or posting photos, or even tweeting some nonsense anymore. Any time I try formulating a tweet, or narrow down a photo to post, or just flush out an idea in my notes app, it’s like my brain simply shuts down. It’s not like I’m just not using Twitter anymore, I’m literally on it every day liking posts. Between new music, movies, and sports news, I genuinely have SO many opinions & hot takes churning in my brain to talk about. Not to mention all my latest photography waiting to be shared, plus YouTube video ideas, and DJ mixes to create. But for some reason, it’s like I have a piece of tape over my mouth and I don’t know how to remove it.

Amidst the peaks and valleys of my mental wellness, my voice has felt faint and sometimes inexistent.

I’m used to being the type of person that always has something going on. At some point this past January & February, I had found a mental groove of recording & editing podcast episodes regularly, tweeting thoughts and posting new photography daily, plan an idea of what I want to create next, while also being able to text people back and check on the people in my life. For a variety of reasons, that all fell apart in the coming months. Maybe I was pink-clouding in the midst of my grief at that point, or maybe that level of productivity was just unsustainable with everything I now have on my plate. I just know that I’m capable of far more than the bare-minimum I’m doing now.

There’s also a (large) chance that I’m being hard on myself for the 15,000th time in my life. I’m not the only person in the world who’s anxiety & trauma has made them an ineffective communicator, so i shouldn’t feel like a failure in that regard. I shouldn’t feel any pressure to perform & create for the microcosm of my digital audience, who likely don’t even realize my lack of online presence. It’s pretty safe to say that they’ll still be there when my inner workflow recovers. I guess I get so excited to build my brand of content creation in this podcast/YouTube/social media sphere because I know in my heart that I’m capable of it, but I end up setting myself to this unrealistic standard of productivity that doesn’t take into account the fact that I’m a lost & grieving guy in his early twenties.

I just fall victim to looking around at what I could be doing, rather than focusing on and accepting what I am doing. I do have some reevaluating to do, but the thing that will remain true is that I miss having something to share; I miss being able to express myself. It’s therapeutic for me at the end of the day, so hopefully I can regain some semblance of that ability sooner than later.

I’m not really sure why I’m writing this. Maybe it’s to justify my lack of online presence lately to the few people that even noticed. I mean this does happen to be the only piece of expression I’ve been able to manifest in the past two months, so maybe I feel like sharing this can put a battery in my back to get the ball rolling again. And shoot, maybe I’m just hoping that the people currently waiting for my text/DM response from several weeks ago could read this and understand my embarrassment. But also, maybe nothing changes and I continue my new hermit ways. Who knows.

Just know that I’m trying y’all. Much love to anyone that’s reached out & checked in on me, I appreciate you more than you know. Just don’t expect a text back any time soon.