Consumption

I remember the phrase "you are what you eat."

For me it was "you become what you fear if you are constantly looking for what's wrong in the world " (mind food).

I wasn't a negative person- I was a scared person. Terrified of all the bad people doing bad things.

Definitely a survival mechanism that leeched into adulthood.

I’m still learning to distance myself from situations and people places and things that drain all m energy- even if they are the best thing in the world for someone else or the most popular account on social media.

I remember reading about people dying from consumption “back in the day” (in history classes ) which was the word for Tuberculosis .

“Tuberculosis disease, or phthisis (ϕθίσις, the Greek word for consumption), was named by the father of allopathic medicine, Hippocrates (c. 460–370 BCE), because the disease appeared to consume the affected person through substantial weight loss and wasting”*

And sometimes when I’ve consumed too much “doomsday scrolling” - I think of this word.

It’s one thing to be informed- it’s a whole other thing to be completely consumed and obsessed.

Today - on social media -I snooze mute , unfriend and even block people that hack at my peace. The constant “you should be very very worried and scared” feels like a slow suffocation of rapacious anger and outrage.

Today in real life, I excuse myself from conversations as politely as possible when my anxiety hits the point where again, I feel light headed and suffocated.

We actually do have the power to control what we consume for news, social media and to an extent our social network.**

We do have the power to decide how much precious energy we are going to spend on the consumption of information that occurs in our lives.

*https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5823327/

** we can’t always control who we have to work with or for - or other situations of obligation