Hi Elephant Journal Community. I’m Holly. I’m a save-the-world-from-itself-aholic. I’m exactly one day into recovery.

Twitter was my drug dealer of choice. It supplied me with an endless stream of reminders of how much mess there was to clean up in the world, while simultaneously arming me with non-stop, up-to-the-minute, super-charged, weapons of information I could use as a counter in my heroic pursuits. It was information crack. A perpetual loop. And I couldn’t quit it.

It got so bad that I would tell myself adamantly, sometimes hourly, that I was not going to check Twitter today. That it only makes me feel bad. That wasting my time, shouting into the void, does nothing. That it only takes time and energy away from the genuinely useful work I’ve been doing. And then, what did I do? I checked Twitter again before I could even finish that declaration in my head. Seriously? What the actual fuck?

It wasn’t always this way. I was the girl who was above all that. I was the one, 20 years ago, explaining to people the dangers of the way our world delivers “news”. How it creates needless despair because it only paints half the picture, and a skewed one at that. How, yes, it’s true that there are endless things going wrong in the world, but that there are also endless things going right and those things need our attention too. That those good things are both our fuel and our way-shower. How we only have so much precious time on this planet, and there’s a finite amount of things we can learn/do in this lifetime, so why not spend it on learning things that will make a difference? How we become what we ingest, even mentally, so we should use caution. But I fell off my own damn band wagon. I bursted my own bubble.

Yesterday I finally figured out why.

See I’m one of those rare birds who was always good at having close relationships with just about everybody. I really didn’t care who anyone was, where they came from, what they believed in. If they were kind of heart, they were in. And because of that, my list of loved one’s covered (and still does) quite the spectrum. So when our politics in this country started to grow radically divisive, I felt it in a special kind of way. I felt like I was literally being torn apart. Limb from limb. This was my family these purveyor’s of propaganda were messing with and I just kind of lost it.

I suddenly felt like I needed to know and understand everything that was being said, on all sides, everywhere, so that I could counter it from my unique perspective. And that expression “evil prevails when good men do nothing” became my bully, making me feel I had to stick with it. At all costs. I had to know all of it. Couldn’t turn away. Who would carry the unification torch?

But one literally can’t know it all. And needless to say absorbing this level of largely toxic information, coupled with having very little power to do anything about it, was exhausting and debilitating. Even with it practically making me sick with worry, I couldn’t quit it. I was afraid to quit it. Like it or not, it had become my way of feeling connected to the world. To stop, meant to disconnect, and I couldn’t do that. Wasn’t that giving up? Wasn’t that burying my head in the sand? Wasn’t that letting the propagandist’s win?

Yesterday I finally gave myself permission to decide that putting my Twitter addiction (and bad news addiction at large) behind me was not equivalent to putting my head in the sand. That I don’t need to know everything said on there in order to live this life and do meaningful work in the world. I don’t need to stay endlessly tethered to a world that doesn’t seem to want to hear from me in the first place and never made much sense to me anyway.

And I realized yet again that, and this is the biggie: I can’t save the world! And furthermore, it doesn’t even need me saving it. The world will do what it does. And I need to do what I do. I am enough. Right now. And it’s long past time for me to simply do what I do best and enjoy it.

But this permission and declaration is shaky at best. It’s likely that one hit from that Twitter stream can still send me down an hours long rabbit hole, where I forget everything I just said, and try to save the world from itself again, which is why I am here at Elephant Journal. To keep myself out of trouble.

An information junkie with a bottomless need to connect with the global conversation can’t just go cold turkey. No, I realized if I wanted to succeed, I was going to have to replace that time I’ve spent on Twitter with something healthier. I honestly didn’t know where the heck to go. What would work for me. I was stumped.

So I threw up a little prayer. Universe? Where should I go? And the universe answered. They said: what about Elephant Journal? You always seem to like the things that Waylon guy posts. Why not go there? And so I did. Here I am. Delighted by everything I’ve seen so far. Happy to be in a place where people seem to make sense. I look forward to reading everything that is being served up here. And I’ll share from time to time myself.

And if any of you ever need support with your own social media addictions, or with writing (I’m a writing coach) or just an ear to listen, I’m here. Grateful to be listening to things that are nourishing.