April 5, 2026

Today is the last day of my self imposed break from social media and alcohol for Lent and while I thought it would be hard to give up these things for 40 days; it was easier than I thought. My decision came out of concern for my mental health when once again I was depressed, anxious and started using threads my personal diary as I drank. Here’s a link to my messy threads account:

Patty’s Messy Threads Account

Also, since the election, it’s been hard to be reminded every day that half the population kinda hates people like me but like so many of my friends, I felt like I needed to be informed of everything happening every single minute of the day. I thought it was important in order to keep myself and my family safe but this “need” started interfering very much with my mental health in ways that were terrible for me. I started getting triggered by posts and felt a great sense of paranoia (as if the world is out to get me) . I had also just been through a breakup in January that ended up being a lot messier than I thought at first and the constant barrage of information about all of the terrible things had me in a spiral for depression and anxiety constantly. I think I cried every week from January until the 3rd week of February while I wrote incredibly sad and depressing poetry that will probably stay between the pages of my journal. It was during this time, I also took my medical provider’s advice to up my dosage of Seroquel since I was having problems sleeping. All of this combined extended my emotional bandwidth again and again and until eventually it snapped. And I was about to snap and felt incredibly emotionally dysregulated to the point that my patience was incredibly low and I was snapping at people close to me. I knew I had to do something to get out of this downward spiral I was in. I had to identify what wasn’t helping me and that felt like social media and alcohol. So around the third week of February ,I uninstalled Instagram, tiktok, Threads, and Facebook. I still went to work and aside from my parenting/daughter duties, all I did was read and exercise after work for a week.

I didn’t even turn on the TV that whole week. Needless to say, I felt much better by the end of the week. By the end of the week I also had a medical appointment with my medical provider and we talked about my how my new dosage of Seroquel wasn’t helping me and decided I had to go down to normal dose and that made a difference as well. That’s when I decided it would be a great idea to give up social media and alcohol for Lent as a type of reset for my nervous system and I’m glad I did. Now, I’ll be honest in saying that I have put a lot of that energy into my YouTube channel it has helped it grow a bit.

I’ve also been reading a lot of poetry blogs on WordPress which is always great and inspiring. And I think that in the month of March, I wrote an insane amount of poetry, like for the first 4 days in March, I wrote something like 100 poems. I’ve also been reconnecting with old friends I hadn’t seen in a while and still going to open mics.

I’ve also watched tons and tons of Latin American Classic Movies on youtube. I don’t know how to compare this time period except for the time one of my kids infected me with lice and I was miserable and had to slowly delouse my hair and it tooks hours and hours but afterwards, I felt so incredibly relieved that I was able to do it and got to keep my hair cause lord knows I am vain and I don’t look good with short hair. Anyways, in this case, we’ll say the lice were like all of those social media posts that kept reminding me the world was burning, people were terrible or fake, and of course, the social media posts that brought up feelings of envy and jealousy and of course, anger. I was becoming infected by this algorithm that became incredibly unhealthy to my mental health. And also, I was paranoid all of the time if I was being judged by my posts since I tend to over post and overshare. I was starting to care a little too much as to how I was being perceived. So I needed to delouse my mind by giving that up along with alcohol. It has helped my mental health so much and I’m able to regulate my emotions so much better now than I have been in a long time.

This time period has also been good for introspection into how much I want to make social media a part of my life because I think there are benefits for it. I’ve been able to find a creative community both local and online through social media. Also, I’ve used it to share my poetry and to promote my blog and other writing projects. Social media can also be used to uplift one another as well, and hype the people in your life. And to an extent, it’s been good to share life updates but not the way I was abusing it by posting several selfies in one week. God, I knew it was a problem when one of my aunts mentioned it to me at my grandmother’s funeral in 2018. I remember how embarrassed I was when she told me but I kept on posting shamelessly. Now, that I’m at my big age of 45, I think I’ll post selfies or life updates sparingly. I think as I get older, I want to be a bit more private about my life. I also need to be mindful because I have parents, kids, and a state job I do want to keep. It’s like that old Spanish saying my Mami has always tells me, “Eres amo de lo que callas, y esclavo de lo que dices” which translates into, “you are the master of what you keep quiet and slave of what you share”.

links to amazing poetry books I’ve read:

Follow my Goodreads Account for more book recommendations.

As far as movie recommendations, here’s my letterboxd account y’all can check out and follow.