Thank You for Supporting TNTH.

Hey, guys. Welcome back to TNTH.

I don’t write these types of posts to annoy any of my readers. I don’t go away for a bit and then come back just so that I can write these more freestyle posts about where I’ve been or why I left in the first place. I write these types of posts because TNTH is a place where I can be myself. Write as me. These types of posts are just as important as the other ones; they all represent a part of me I am willing to share out to the world publicly.

If you don’t want to hear another “this is what happened” story out of me, then this post isn’t for you. That’s okay.

If you decide to continue to hear what I have to say, then thank you for supporting TNTH.

It’s been a rough summer. Without being too melodramatic, this summer has been one of the hardest I’ve had in a long time. In the beginning of the summer, I remember sharing my post about the Metanoia, which was the journey of changing one’s life in any and every aspect. I characterized my journey through The Hurting, The Healing, and The Loving: inspired by Camila Cabello’s forthcoming debut album. I thought I was in The Healing. For most of the month, I was happy with myself, I was learning a lot about myself and those around me, and I felt I had control again. But then, life happens and you lose track of what you’re working for. For the rest of the summer, I lost what I was working towards.

Depression is nothing to joke about, glorify, or to stereotype. When you’re depressed, nothing in life feels balanced. You feel uneasy 24/7, you have this overwhelming feeling of sadness no matter how many times you smile or laugh in a day. It’s that feeling you get when you’re about to go to sleep at night and you’re thinking “Wow, tomorrow is just going to be like today; what’s the fucking point?” It’s that sense of hopelessness, loneliness, and self-doubt that dictates everything in your life so that you’re not able to move on and carry on with your life. It’s a burden, and for the past 2 months, it got to the point where I couldn’t keep living like this. I needed to change something (or everything) before things got worse.

I’m not asking you all to feel sorry for me. I am a grown woman that needed the reality check that life moves forward even if you’re not ready for it yet. I needed to see shit and deal with shit that showed me how much I am really worth. I needed to not be so damn afraid of owning up to my issues and my poor mental health. Sometimes, you really need to get the shit beaten out of you for you to finally stand up on your feet and take initiative in your own life.

Personally, I left social media because I knew it was unhealthy for me to be so caught up in the number of views TNTH posts were getting or likes that my photos were getting. I was tired of seeing my peers and old classmates doing “better” than me. People are so quick to share their biggest accomplishments on social media not because they really care if the people who follow them know their big news, but because those type of statuses or posts is guaranteed to give them plenty of likes and comments online. Personally, it’s a reason why I feel women announce their pregnancies online way early on; it’s an automatic “likes” machine. It’s a major reason why I even stopped tweeting about my personal life on Twitter; nobody really cares about your life unless they are good friends or family of yours. This post defeats the purpose, but yet again this is my blog. Anyway, I just wanted to take some time for myself and keep the personal things to myself, but I knew that a life without social media meant that I was hurting the community on TNTH. I knew that deactivating my social media accounts would result in the community not being able to get new updates on TNTH or get access to those said posts without the Facebook page or Instagram/Twitter link.

At that moment, I really didn’t care if I came back to TNTH or not. Coming back to TNTH meant that I cared about the numbers and the statistics and all of the shit I was obsessed with back in July. It meant that I had to come back to social media and post just so that I could keep TNTH relevant still. When I “unofficially” came back on TNTH with the I’m Not Okay, and that’s FINE post, I was still not all there that night when I posted it. I was still looking at numbers and disappointed when I saw that the community of TNTH was not together anymore.

I thought none of this bothered me until I explained to my writing professor, Professor Carlo, what’s been up with me these last few months.

Without getting too personal, she basically told me that before anything else, my blog has to be for me. I started it for a reason, and I needed to find that reason again. Secondly, she said that the “comparing myself to social media thing” is bound to happen when people my age are expected to have started to leave their mark on the world. She called it impractical. She actually told me how social media affects anyone who chooses to allow it to define your worth. She told me this:

It’s easy to get sucked into this mindset where you’re on social media and you compare other people’s success to your own. I’m 32 and I find myself doing that at times. I’ll look at another scholar and see that they published a book in the recent months and go “well, shit – it’s such a good book compare to the one I cannot complete for the life of me.” But then I step back, and write that next chapter in my book. I turn off my phone for a couple of hours and appreciate the career I built for myself. I know you’re still young, Liz, and you have an entire journey to figure out on your own. But don’t let social media get in the way of your success. Don’t let the numbers on your blog dictate your passion for writing. Go and prove your doubts wrong.

Besides telling me to do what was right for me, she told me to listen to other people’s stories; everyone has one. Some will be like hers, where she went through school without any break, and then there are others who had to take a left turn on their paths to success. She then told me to figure out what my story is, where I want to go in the next year, and what am I going to do to get there.

So here I am, trying to rewrite my own story.

Long story short, I am here to build back what I left behind. I won’t be posting on TNTH as much as I once did just because the school year is starting, but I will try my best to keep up with TNTH and to build on it as the months go by.

For those *still* reading, thank you for still wanting to read what I write. It’s people like you guys that encourage me to be a better writer and love what I do. In all honesty, I want to write like this for the rest of my life. TNTH is just the beginning of that direction.

Thank you for supporting TNTH.

-Liz (: