Resetting ME

Hello and welcome to Believe in ME with Rhona Barton.

This podcast is about all things Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) related!

I'm Rhona and I lived with ME for almost 10 years during which time, I was bed-bound and wheelchair-bound, welcome to my Podcast.

Hello and welcome to Believe in ME with Rhona Barton. In this week’s episode, I’m going to be chatting about how things are going so far in 2023!

You can head to www.rhonabarton.co.uk/media for more information about me and my story.

Don’t forget that you can review, share & follow the podcast via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you’re listening now.

Ok, let’s jump straight in!

How are you getting on with your plan for 2023? I’ll be honest, mine went off track a few days into the New Year. I uploaded, via my social media scheduler, a post about goals and motivation and I was jumped on by people in the ME community who thought I was “having a go” at them for not “trying” or not being motivated enough. I was accused of spreading toxic positivity and of trying to take advantage of our community. I was told that I didn’t know what I was talking about and that I clearly didn’t know anything about ME or what it was like to live with.

Now, initially I made the mistake of trying to be rational with the first couple of comments. I considered taking the post down. I thought about editing the post, but I’d pretty much reached the character limit. The notifications for this one Social Media site went crazy! It’s the most interaction I’ve had on a post, and it knocked me for six. What had I done wrong? I began to tailspin, and I read every comment and took them all to heart.

I had a call later that evening with my Podcast coach and our Mastermind group and they received the brunt of my “I’m so over Social Media” rant! They asked me questions and challenged my responses as any good friend, let alone coach, would do. But I was in the middle of the yuckiness of it all and I really didn’t want to be facing what I was being asked. So instead, I listened to what they were saying, and I took some notes so that I could reflect on things when the time felt right for me. But what surprised me from this situation was that I, at 45 years old, was a recipient of cyber bullying. That’s what it was. And I was shocked.

People who didn’t know me, didn’t know my story, felt comfortable to call me all sorts online. All because they disagreed with one hashtag on a post. They didn’t come to listen to the podcast. They didn’t venture to my website to find out more, they just turned into angry keyboard warriors.

I let my social media schedular run the rest of the scheduled posts and I didn’t edit any of them or change their pre-set hashtags. I spent days thinking about and reflecting on what these comments said and trying to weigh up what, if anything, these may have been correct about. I thought about the questions that my Podcast coach and Mastermind group had posed. After all of this, I decided that I needed to take a break from social media. I needed to stop and reset my brain. So I took 4 weeks off and had a holiday. I made a point of not...