Post I: Paw Patrol

The Introduction Feed

Author

Wyatt Stephens
May 23, 2024

My daughter Charlie had a pair of Paw Patrol slippers that she loved to wear as a toddler. They were her magical shoes that opened the doors to any world she wanted to visit, real or imagined.

Charlie would mimic everything that I did in her new world: she held a pen like I did, she brushed her teeth like I did, she even answered the phone like I did with a charming toddler, ‘hewoahh?’ that melted the hearts of whoever called.

One winter day, Charlie and myself went to a local Mexican restaurant in Greenville, South Carolina, where we lived at the time. On the way there, Charlie chattered nonstop about what she was learning in school: shapes, colors, and how to draw them on bright construction paper.

As we approached a four-way stop, I pointed to a stop sign and asked her, ‘Hey Charlie, what is that shape?’ She looked at the stop sign and with a confident grin answered, ‘an octagon!’’

I was thrilled, but I am going to admit, I wasn’t entirely sure if Charlie was right or if she was just guessing.

Regardless, I gave Charlie dad-like positive reinforcement.

But she didn’t need it.

She knew she was right.

Charlie was proud of her knowledge and was eager to share it. She kept babbling about school, providing me with enough time to Google Search, ‘octagon.’

And sure enough, Charlie was right: a stop sign is indeed an octagon.

I grinned at the results on my screen until I felt a kick to my backseat with a toddler-demand from Charlie, ‘What are you doing Dad? Go!’’

In that moment I realized that my Soul was not in the present reality with Charlie and that I was rather in a mindless digital moment.

A move to Los Angeles

A year later, in the summer of 2021, I would travel cross-country by myself, relocating from Greenville to Los Angeles

Back in South Carolina, my life was in complete shambles.

With the exception of Charlie, I found myself burning too many bridges with family and those within my inner-circles. For right or wrong reasons, I guarded myself closely and swam within the depths of a deep and dark ocean, fueling every stroke with hard liquor in an effort to freestyle my way either in, or out of life.

The dark ocean that I was drowning in had no middle ground of rationality, only two halves of irrationalities.

On one side: manifesting extreme Hollywood luxuries. And on the other: masks of deceitful portrayal, both offline in my personal isolated life, and the filtered masks that I publicly posted on social media.

There is something about me that I know quite well: I like acting, but I have never liked acting.

I believed a move to Los Angeles would not only change my behaviors but that I could also debrief from a life of deceit that I once knew. I could turn over a new leaf and receive societal validation by living in society’s heartbeat city of Los Angeles.

Within a month of settling into my new LA life, I found myself drawn to Hollywood’s thriving comedy scene, frequently becoming a patron of well-known comedy clubs. My familiarity of the clubs, the staff, bartenders, and my outgoing personality, opened a pathway to rub shoulders with comedians whose work I admired on-screen.

Being within the presence of these public profiles gave me a sense of belonging, a personal validation. I had a connection to a world that I had always wished to be a part of.

But between my drinking, societal masks, and laughter, a darker truth lurked. I was still living a lie, publishing filtered content of a persona that I wished for all on social media to see.

My filtered feeds of stories, reels, and posts would become habit-forming because of synthetic and temporary highs. I was hooked and hyper-focused in the digital reality of synthetics and avoided much beauty of the unfiltered real-world and it’s ascetics.

By various definitions, the word synthetic can be defined as falsity:

a false narrative, or conformity, of society without grasping societal knowledge or societal fundamentals.

Looking back, this definition made perfect sense of where I was in my season of life. I lacked societal knowledge and fundamentals. Often, it was hard for me to connect with elements that I knew could validate me, those elements that I sought within the real-world. This lack of self-validation was a constant and recurring theme throughout my life.

But I would start the process of learning how to love myself in the most strangest of ways: after a night of a binger.

Detoxing from the physical and digital

I woke up one morning shaking from alcohol withdrawal after going out in Hollywood the night prior. To this day, I am led to believe that I had a grand mal seizure based on various bruises throughout my body.

By Grace, I was rationale enough to understand that not only could I have died, but that I had also had enough: I was unable to bear the physical and emotional harm that I continued to put myself through. Thus, I entered a detox facility in Culver City, a subsidy of Los Angeles, where I would stay for the next seven-days, detoxing from those physical and emotional pains.

By the time my discharge date from detox rolled around, I had decided to take advantage of a rare opportunity, unplugging from the real world for the next thirty-days in a rehab facility.

For roughly thirty-days I was able to focus on myself without the distractions of the digital and physical world. Rehab would be the first time, since the age of eleven, that I would go without plugging into anything digital for over a three week timespan.

Rehab was four-weeks of trusting the process.

I forced my mind to visualize what I was learning in rehab and how I could nourish healthy behaviors in the post-rehab world: addiction, self-validation and love, social communications, relationships, connections, community, and being of service to others.

The knowledge that I built in rehab completely changed the framework to this project, Unfiltered Feeds: Direct Messages of Hope.

Because of my background, which I have included at the bottom, I had seen a need to spread digital hope since 2020, which was the year when I started authoring this project.

I became aware of modern societal struggles that I was challenged with, those challenges that the majority of us face: comparing ourselves to others on social media, digital egos, focusing on the number of likes we get, how many followers we have, who views our Instagram stories, and even those that cyberbully others online for twisted kicks of a high.

I wanted to publish these modern societal observations right away. I also wanted to incorporate humanistic components into our digital world, allowing us to have a better health of mind.

But my Higher Power forced me to slow down.

He used my time in rehab as an outlet to identify my own struggles, my lack of self-confidence, lack of self-love, lack of internal validation, and to address the many dangers I have in being a people pleaser.

Of additional importance while in rehab: the time that I was able to spend with younger generations, having conversations with those that also struggle with various addictions, self-esteem, anxieties and depression, just to name a few.

These discussions, combined with my personal self-inventory and self-explorations, continue to motivate my curiosities.

They have opened up creative and motivation channels with hopes that I can not only identify certain elements in social media and societal pressures, but promote concepts for healthier digital behaviors and stronger digital communities.

As a community, I look forward to venturing into this project with you all and strongly encourage each one of us, myself included, to be open, curious, and question with self-reflection as many concepts and ideas will be shared throughout Unfiltered Feeds: Direct Messages of Hope.

See you very soon.

Post published,
Wyatt

My digital and educational background

It is important for me as a new author to establish my digital background.

I believe that Unfiltered Feeds: Direct Messages of Hope can be incorporated into self-help and awareness in one’s personal matters, but also in matters that are business related.

Digital background

The companies that I have either worked for, or with, and other projects:

  • Apple Inc: Campus Representative and team collaborations within the early stages of iBooks and iBooks Author.

  • Grow with Google High-Impact Partner with the agency that I created, Curations.

  • Three different educational technology companies either at the time, or are now considered, as Fortune 500 Companies.

  • Founder of ShareGVL (Share Greenville), a generational storytelling website for my then-hometown of Greenville, South Carolina. Various interviews have been incorporated into this project, tailored for confidentiality purposes.

  • Founder, CuratedLA: a hyper-local platform and newsletter that showcases positivity for all things Los Angeles, and those industries within LA.

  • Collaborations and trainings with both small to medium-sized business as it pertains to humanizing digital, and establishing organic communities online.

  • Collaborations with Congressional Legal Counsel on matters related to online protection, cyberbullying, and how to seal and protect violent content by virtue amendment proposals of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

  • Creating digital frameworks since the age of thirteen.

Educational background:

  • Clemson University, Special Education: Multi-categorical, cum laude

  • Clemson University, Minor: Journalism

  • Stanford University, Technology Entrepreneurship (lecture audit)

Within Unfiltered Feeds: Direct Messages of Hope, we will:

  • Explore how we can all rewire our brains to establish organic connection, empathy, curate digital creativity.

  • How to be unfiltered in appropriate circumstances, creating positive digital chemistry that fosters curiosity, digital health of mind, and healthy communication.

  • How to implement digital and physical triggers for digital and physical health of mind.

  • How to become a digital steward: how influencers can establish community, both offline and offline.

  • Establish and learn about tactics of digital empathy; elements that we can all incorporate for digital Good.

  • Identify how our different walks of life actually provide us all with more similarities, rather than that of differences by incorporating various strategies, such as the digital mirror effect.

Unfiltered Feeds: Direct Messages of Hope will consist of:

  • Previous psychological ideas and concepts with a modern shuffle.

  • Original concepts, ideas.

  • Digital models of psychology.

  • Strategies for living a modern and healthier life, both online and offline.

  • Various digital strategies of enablement.

  • Digital community.

  • Interviews: both written and in podcast form, with influencers, and forerunners within the realms of modern psychology, digital, and community.

Inspirational curations for Unfiltered Feeds: Direct Messages of Hope:

  • My beautiful daughter, Charlie.

  • All those teachers that watched me swim as a Guppie, to graduating as a Clemson Tiger.

  • Over seven years of self-help and self-discovery.

  • Digital realizations.

  • Digital empathy.

  • My workings within branding, social media, and digital marketing, and creativity, as recently seen with CuratedLA.

  • Digital service to others.

  • The start of digital fulfillment, and validation.

Influential authors, their books, ideas, and content, include:

Other influential content: