The following podcast is a dear media production.

Hi friends and welcome to the papaya podcast.

I'm your hostess, Trin Hermostis, Sarah Nicole.

And each week I'm going to be dishing out some sweetness mixed in with some seeds of wisdom or something like that.

So get ready to get inspired, get candid,

get real, because we are all in this digital space together. All right, Larissa, welcome to

the show. I am beyond excited to get into this conversation because very much connects for me, I guess, a little

bit.

You are from Half the Story.

Tell me what the heck is Half the Story.

Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me.

I'm the founder, an executive director of Halfapha's Story, which is a nonprofit to

help the next generation develop healthy relationships with technology. And I started it because,

like most of us, we start things that we try to solve for ourselves. And about six and a half years

ago, I had really hit my rock bottom and was like, look, I want to be a part of the solution and haven't stopped since.

Talk to me about what that looked like. What led you to rock bottom? Because there was a lot of us who our entire jobs are in social media, our entire lives are on, you know, an app or phone technology.

I'm curious how it led you to kind of developing sort of

these healthy skills around technology and social media. But what was that rock bottom? Yeah. Well,

I was a sophomore in college. And at the time, I was obsessed with social media. I had started

a fashion blog at the time because I was really excited

about the idea of becoming a fashion influencer. And it really started to consume my life. I remember

being on the treadmill, you know, excited to be working out because then I could try to get likes and

...