There are very few times in Yow Yow’s! life where we’ve stepped away for a bit. Over the holidays is when I feel the most content charged, but I forget that periods of that can also lead to my own burnout. In January, I left the city for a cabin 90 minutes away. We still had access to wifi and I was still active on most of social, but selective. Instead of sharing immediate stories from my stay, I waited until I returned back to San Francisco. Nothing was preventing me from sharing out, but I needed this for myself.

The two weeks that I chose to go silent were two weeks in which the world chose to be loud. It started out as a slow burn with Bean dad and white women Mahjong before it escalated to our Georgia runoff win, the insurrection and Trump being banned on Twitter and Facebook. Somewhere in the mix, there was a Soho Karen.

I couldn’t break my rule of not posting during this time. The plan was to return home and share my thoughts afterwards. That time never came. It was a combination of the news just not being relevant anymore and myself not feeling the need to comment anymore. It may seem like an obvious lesson here, but news is timely. It’s one of the reasons why we ask our friends whether they are ‘living under a rock?’ when they’re a day late to a story breaking.

When the moment has passed, we should let it. In 2021, we act as if we all need to have commentary on everything. Shouldn’t the focus be on being better listeners? There’s a race to get to the news first and to have our take on it, but more often than not, it’s not our voice that needs to be heard. Stepping back for two weeks made me realize that I could sit back every once in a while. Why not let someone else’s voice be amplified? I thought this challenge for myself would be difficult, but it wasn’t. In fact, it only showed me how easy it could be to step away someday and be completely okay with all of this.