I Am Allowed to Choose a Normal Life!

Please stop pressuring people to put purple as their profile picture. Stop making people feel guilty for choosing not to become social media activists. I am saying this from a deeply personal place because, for me, social media has always been one of the few places where I feel I can control the narrative. I get to decide what parts of my life I share, how I tell my story, and what I allow the people who follow me to see. That might not seem like much to someone who has never had their sense of safety, privacy, or control taken away from them, but it means something to me. I have experienced things that changed the way I move through the world. Sexual abuse, physical abuse, severe depression, suicide attempts, and experiences that left me in intensive care are only some of the traumatic things I have lived through since I was as young as twelve. I do not share these things on social media because I am trying to live. I want to feel normal. I want to wake up, make my plans, laugh, work, create, mother my child, enjoy beautiful things, and talk about ordinary life without constantly being reminded of everything I have survived. Sometimes surviving means wanting your life to feel ordinary again.

I think this is something people do not always understand about trauma. There are survivors who want to speak. There are survivors who become activists. There are survivors who dedicate their lives to educating other people about what happened to them. And then there are survivors who simply want some peace. None of these responses make someone more or less of a victim, and none of them determine how seriously someone takes violence. I can believe that gender based violence and sexual violence need to be spoken about while also knowing that I personally cannot consume endless conversations, photographs, videos, and stories about them without being affected. I have to be particular about what I follow and what I engage with because I know myself. I know what certain subjects can do to me. There are things I have worked incredibly hard to heal from, and I do not believe healing requires me to repeatedly expose myself to the things that hurt me simply to prove that I care. Sometimes caring about yourself means knowing when to look away. Sometimes it means closing the app. Sometimes it means refusing to participate in a conversation that everyone else has decided you must join.

I also think we need to be more careful about assuming that silence means indifference. We do not know what people are carrying behind their profile pictures. We do not know who is scrolling through their timeline and seeing people who harmed them walking freely. We do not know who is remembering something that happened to them when they were a child. We do not know who attempted to take their own life and then woke up the next morning and continued living without ever telling anyone. We do not know who is currently struggling just to get through an ordinary day. Someone can choose not to post a purple profile picture and still care deeply about victims. Someone can refuse to share graphic stories and still believe that violence is wrong. Someone can decide that their social media will be a place for books, motherhood, fashion, food, travel, jokes, creativity, or ordinary moments because ordinary moments are precisely what they have been fighting to reclaim. We should not demand that survivors constantly prove their compassion by publicly reopening their wounds.

For me, this is also about having the right to tell my own story in the way that feels safe for me. I will probably never share the darkest parts of my life on the internet. That is not because I am ashamed of what happened to me. It is because I have decided that some parts of my life belong to me. I do not owe the internet my pain. I do not have to turn my trauma into content, advocacy, or education for my experiences to be real. I do not have to become an activist simply because I have survived things that could have made me one. That is not what I was born to do. I have other things I want to build, other things I want to talk about, and other parts of myself I want to explore. I want to write about books. I want to talk about psychology. I want to create beautiful things. I want to mother my daughter. I want to work, laugh, dream, and experience the parts of life that trauma once made difficult to imagine. I am allowed to want that.

And perhaps this is where I become particularly protective of the idea of a normal life. There is something incredibly precious about being able to live without constantly identifying yourself through what happened to you. I do not want every conversation to take me back to the worst moments of my life. I do not want every campaign to become an invitation to remember. I do not want to be told that if I am not posting, sharing, educating or changing my profile picture, then I must not care enough. I have spent enough of my life trying to get myself back. I do not want to be bullied into abandoning the peace I have worked for because social media has decided that everyone must participate in the same public demonstration. Activism can be meaningful and necessary for people who choose it. But choosing not to participate does not make someone selfish, heartless or ignorant. We should be able to support a cause without demanding that every person support it in exactly the same way.

There is also a difference between being there for people and forcing people to speak. Sometimes the best thing you can do for someone who has survived something terrible is simply listen. You do not always need to give advice. You do not always need to tell them what they should do next. You do not always need to turn their pain into a lesson. Sometimes you can just sit beside them and allow them to exist. Even professionals who have supported me through difficult seasons cannot completely know what it feels like to live inside my particular mind and carry my particular history. They can listen, support, and offer guidance, but there will always be parts of another person's experience that only that person can fully know. That is why I have become protective of my own boundaries. When I am struggling, it is my family who gets to see me in those moments and help me through them. They know what it looks like when I am not okay. They know the version of me that social media will never see. And I think that is enough.

I am not asking anyone to stop speaking about gender based violence, sexual violence, or the experiences of victims. These conversations matter, and people should absolutely be allowed to speak if speaking is part of their healing or activism. I am simply asking that we remember there are many different ways to survive. Some people will speak loudly. Some will organise. Some will educate. Some will campaign. Some will change their profile pictures. And some of us will quietly close the app because we are trying to protect the life we have fought so hard to build. I am one of those people. I do not want to be pulled back into depression because someone on the internet decided that my silence needs to be explained. I have already fought battles that nobody watching my Instagram stories would ever know about. I am still here. I am still healing. I am still becoming. And I want the rest of my life to contain more than the things that happened to me. I want some normal. I want some softness. I want some joy. I want to live without constantly proving that I survived. And I believe I am allowed to choose that.