I’ve always been a warm weather kinda girl. My cactus heart pleasantly dwells in the heat, but slowly wilts and shrivels in the short, cold, cloudy days of winter. A chill creeps into my soul and keeps me company for months, my blue eyes go gray, and time all but stops.

There’s more to it than just the dreary cold, but a correlation certainly exists between wintertime and deep inner hollowness. I should expect it by now, yet every time winter starts approaching, I make myself believe that it’s all in my head, things are fine, and there’s no difference between the other months of the year.

I continue living my life, focusing on keeping my head above water, and it’s not until I reach the shore that I look back and realize just how deeply the ghost of me managed to sink.

November is when the trouble started last year. January was an all time low.  I started to thaw a bit in March, and by May I could finally breathe normally again. The best way to describe it is a deep emptiness, where nothing in the world matters except for maybe three things, and they become an obsession. The majority of the time I just wanted to hide away, an endless game of searching everywhere in my house for my own emotions, and then choking when I did find every single one of them stored precariously in a closet, an avalanche knocking me down as soon as the door’s opened.

At some point, I decided something had to give. I wanted to take care of myself, my brain, and my emotions to the best of my ability, but I didn’t know how. I searched for answers on what exactly was kicking me so hard, but a straight answer never came. It was everything and nothing.

I couldn’t change the weather, but I could change my life. Something had to go, so I started eliminating every joyless thing in my life that wasn’t serving a legitimate purpose. Twitter has never really been my favorite, so I cut that out. My presence on Snapchat became all but nonexistent. Facebook had long become a bit disdainful, especially since election season, so I deactivated it and axed the Messenger app while I was at it.

I wondered how I would cope, especially without Facebook. It sounds silly, but when you’ve mindlessly looked at something almost every day for seven years, it’s a little different no longer having it. I thought it might be tough. I figured I’d regret it and be back after a month.

Fast forward half a year: Snapchat is on my phone, but only for communicating with my absolute most beloved humans; Twitter is here too, but I don’t really look at it; Facebook and Messenger, however, are still gleefully gone, and not a single moment has passed where I’ve missed them. Good riddance.

Social media can be toxic, and for me, Facebook was.

There have been studies about social media making people unhappy, but I feel like there’s a different sort of unhappiness surrounding it that people don’t talk about as much. Say Amy posts about going on vacation with her family to Hawaii, Kim brags about her shiny new car, and Jerry relentlessly shows off all his healthy meal creations. You’ve never been on such an exotic vacation, your car is falling apart, and you’re just proud of yourself for making boxed mac and cheese for dinner. This is what the studies are on. We already know you’re kinda jealous and hard on yourself for not having the lives of Amy, Kim, and Jerry (and Nathaniel and Jennifer and Samantha and Elizabeth, because we have hundreds of lives to envy there).

But in my own personal experience, it’s not exactly like that. When I see Amy post about her trip to Hawaii, I’m not sad about it. I’m glad she gets to go. Maybe I’ll try to come up with my own plan to make it there next year. Going to Hawaii is a big deal, and I know it’s a big deal in Amy’s life (especially going by how frequently she posts about it).

The trouble comes when she gets home from vacation and the good times continue.  Happy status after happy status about regular life things. It’s still not a jealousy issue; it’s a standard of happiness issue.

When you’re constantly surrounded by people who seem happy all the time, happiness becomes the new normal. The expectation. The rule.

Everyone else in my social media circle looks so dang happy, so what is wrong with me? Why am I not that happy too? Being simply content is no longer enough.

Looking back at history, I’d say expectations of leading a characteristically happy life is a pretty new phenomenon. Not to say folks in the olden days were unhappy, but you did what you needed to do to make a living, and that was that. There was a greater reverence and resignation to the fact that life is hard and it’s simple as that.

Now we’re all about following our dreams, doing what we want to do, and being emotionally happy all the time. When life pushes its way in, as it likes to do, we crash and burn because that’s not what’s supposed to happen. Everyone else is living this happy life, so I deserve one too.

Depression is at an all time high among us young people, and I have to wonder how much of that is linked with social media. Although I know Facebook is hardly to blame for all my mental troubles, I don’t think I’ll be re-activating my account anytime soon. My own mind is a toxic place, and I’m continuing to work on flushing out every outside source that’s feeding it. It’s currently the middle of June, I feel like myself, and mentally I’m in a pretty good place. If I keep at it, maybe this winter won’t be so bad. Maybe next summer I’ll be even better.

But then, I often wonder if a true inner peace can possibly exist within an active writer. Either unhappiness pulls us to write, or writing pushes us at unhappiness. I haven’t decided which yet. I haven’t decided if it’s a price I’d pay or not; to be at peace, but never effectively touch a pen again.

I’m rambling, sorry. That’s a topic for another day.

It’s important to regularly clean out your life. Get rid of the toxic things. Find your own balance between happiness and contentment. And don’t trust social media.