Social Media Sux
I am petrified of social media. In the past I have:
- gone private when I feel like I'm getting too much attention
- deactivated my account before a controversial story is published
- actively refrained (with 80 percent success) from posting about holidays and friends and highlights that would misrepresent my life.
Broad strokes, these are my reasons: I don't like being seen by so many people with such little context. I don't like how people get social brownie points by pulling each other down. I don't like the extreme emotions. I don't like the things people infer from posts and use against each other. I definitely do not like the noise. I don't like it.
But I am comfortable sharing thoughts and feelings. In fact, that's how I process them. Writing is my process of understanding. I am able to speak out the different forces in my head. I am able to see myself without judgement.
It made perfect sense for me to write and share now: I've been struggling with an illness that requires me to live with frequent pain. It requires me to embrace inability. Of course I'd need to write about it. I can create the kind of writing I want to read. How else could I put my pain to use?
So I began writing about the disease. One of the first things I wrote about was how, because of my disease, I'd given up wearing a bra. A few friends enjoyed it. Then, former colleague (and friend) who is an editor asked if she could share it on her website. I said "haha yes". It turns out, quite a number of people liked that post on Instagram. My instagram followers went up by thirty percent in one night. I got dozens of DMs. A lot of people were asking me whether they should wear a bra. A lot of people were telling the reasons they did wear a bra. A lot of people were starting to consider whether or not they wanted to wear a bra. Only one person said something truly horrible, which, given the internet, is not bad. I tried to answer as many as I could. I wrote again, and again. "This is me and my body. You do you".
It took a couple of days to recover from that. Then it began to dawn on me that nobody had actually paid attention to the real core of the story. It was about me trying to listen to my body - always-changing, always-diseased, with its own likes and dislikes. I felt sad for a bit that not a lot of people really saw that. The metaphor had fallen weak.
A few days later I tried again. I wrote about loss. About what this disease had cost me. On cue, I got a lot of hearts and "so sorry, you're so amazing" messages. (Which is probably most meaningful, most compassionate thing to say to somebody like me.) But I didn't write it for compassion and empathy. I wrote it for it to be understood.
And then something truly miraculous happened.
Somebody, lets call her L, wrote to tell me that her mom has arthritis. She has always pushed her mom to do more, be more. But she never saw her mom's arthritis as a loss. My post, she said, helped her see her mom through new eyes. She said it was going to help her be a better daughter.
Imagine that.
Now that I've decided to actively open up on social media on a public account, I've had to think about what kind of feedback I pay attention to and what kind I ignore. How I allow it to impact me. What I will engage with and what I won't. I think L set the golden standard. I want to work towards seeing and showing something old with new eyes.
If I can manage either of those, once in a while, then that is big. I'll try not to think about the rest of it.
- gone private when I feel like I'm getting too much attention
- deactivated my account before a controversial story is published
- actively refrained (with 80 percent success) from posting about holidays and friends and highlights that would misrepresent my life.
Broad strokes, these are my reasons: I don't like being seen by so many people with such little context. I don't like how people get social brownie points by pulling each other down. I don't like the extreme emotions. I don't like the things people infer from posts and use against each other. I definitely do not like the noise. I don't like it.
But I am comfortable sharing thoughts and feelings. In fact, that's how I process them. Writing is my process of understanding. I am able to speak out the different forces in my head. I am able to see myself without judgement.
It made perfect sense for me to write and share now: I've been struggling with an illness that requires me to live with frequent pain. It requires me to embrace inability. Of course I'd need to write about it. I can create the kind of writing I want to read. How else could I put my pain to use?
So I began writing about the disease. One of the first things I wrote about was how, because of my disease, I'd given up wearing a bra. A few friends enjoyed it. Then, former colleague (and friend) who is an editor asked if she could share it on her website. I said "haha yes". It turns out, quite a number of people liked that post on Instagram. My instagram followers went up by thirty percent in one night. I got dozens of DMs. A lot of people were asking me whether they should wear a bra. A lot of people were telling the reasons they did wear a bra. A lot of people were starting to consider whether or not they wanted to wear a bra. Only one person said something truly horrible, which, given the internet, is not bad. I tried to answer as many as I could. I wrote again, and again. "This is me and my body. You do you".
It took a couple of days to recover from that. Then it began to dawn on me that nobody had actually paid attention to the real core of the story. It was about me trying to listen to my body - always-changing, always-diseased, with its own likes and dislikes. I felt sad for a bit that not a lot of people really saw that. The metaphor had fallen weak.
A few days later I tried again. I wrote about loss. About what this disease had cost me. On cue, I got a lot of hearts and "so sorry, you're so amazing" messages. (Which is probably most meaningful, most compassionate thing to say to somebody like me.) But I didn't write it for compassion and empathy. I wrote it for it to be understood.
And then something truly miraculous happened.
Somebody, lets call her L, wrote to tell me that her mom has arthritis. She has always pushed her mom to do more, be more. But she never saw her mom's arthritis as a loss. My post, she said, helped her see her mom through new eyes. She said it was going to help her be a better daughter.
Imagine that.
Now that I've decided to actively open up on social media on a public account, I've had to think about what kind of feedback I pay attention to and what kind I ignore. How I allow it to impact me. What I will engage with and what I won't. I think L set the golden standard. I want to work towards seeing and showing something old with new eyes.
If I can manage either of those, once in a while, then that is big. I'll try not to think about the rest of it.
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