Struggling With Social Media

I've been really struggling with social media lately, and while this might not seem grief-related, it's all connected for me, since I seem to be in a perpetual state of grieving.

There's so much tension for me in using social media.  Especially now, as there's such an enormous difference for me from 15 or so years ago when it all started being a thing to now.  Blogs and posts were a way to connect with friends.  Now my closest friends and family are largely off social media (either never having been on it or having tried it and left in disgust), so it's not connecting me to them.

I currently have about 700 friends on Facebook.  When I post about the most important events of my existence (deaths and celebrations), the most attention a post has ever gotten is about 180 likes.  I find this to be so bizarre, as that means I have 520 people who I'm calling "friends" who don't interact with my sharing, so either they aren't following me or they don't care, which makes it so weird that we maintain an online connection. 520 people that just feel like baggage to me.

I've been thinking about this a lot: my life before social media was linear, for all practical purposes.  I was born and then I moved from school to school, then from job/place to job/place.  At each point, I formed relationships in each situation, for better or for worse, and when I moved on from that point, I largely left behind those relationships, because few of them were sustainable.  

A handful of friendships persisted, and persist today, because they were meaningful and helpful and healthy and good.  A few "friendships" hung on past the transition because of my codependent tendencies, not wanting to deal with draining emotional interactions of making a break that the relationship didn't seem to merit.  But for the most part, even if I carried into the present some emotional baggage from the relationships, the relationship itself (as far as keeping in touch in any way) was left in the past.

But then social media came along and suddenly a large percentage of the people from each phase of my life were there, adding me as "friends." All of sudden, the linear nature of my life got swallowed up in this timelessness of having a huge portion of my life swirling around me at all times on these online platforms. High school, for example, which I had largely and very happily left far, far in the past was now just daily thrown in my face again.

While I have been genuinely delighted to reconnect with some people, glad to see how they "turned out," glad to see them leading productive, meaningful lives, and be able to share in life together, celebrating each other and amusing each other, and often mourning together, I would be lying if I didn't say that largely the re-connections for me have been negative.

Social media has given needy people that I left behind a way to reconnect with me or stay connected to me, where normally I would have cut them off, giving them a continual way to access my life and my energy.  People who treated me badly when I knew them in real life now have access to me, to either continue their terrible treatment of me, or to, without ever making amends of any kind, now try to convince me they're better now and constantly albeit subtly ask for my stamp of approval.

One word: YUCK.  I don't need that, any of that.  I'm tired of it. It's unhealthy for me, a recovering codependent who always wants to take care of people and make everything better for people, to the detriment of my own mental health.  

There's so much pressure not to make people feel bad.  And the truth of the matter is that when someone sees that you unfriended them, they do feel bad.  In some cases, they take it really personally and get their feelings really hurt.  Like, ridiculously so, because you're not really friends at all.  You would never hang out in person.  You would never make any sort of plans together.  They wouldn't be invited to your life celebrations.  You would never grab coffee. But they'll be super sad if you unfriend them on social media. 

So social media has created this whole new world of pressure and guilt and emotion, like we needed any more of that in our lives.  I have "friends" on social media, girls that never spoke to me once in person in years of being at the same small-town schools together, who now know where I hiked that day..  I have "friends" on social media from more recent real-life social situations, where I didn't even really enjoy their company in person, who now know what restaurant I'm at and what I'm ordering.

It's weird, isn't it?  Can we just say that out loud?  Why do we do this to ourselves?

And I know, I'm not an idiot.  It's largely about networking, which is a nice way of saying "hoping to make money off these connections somehow." But I'm not in it for that, at least not at the moment.  Back when I was actively doing music, yes, there was a lot of that.  It was never terribly effective and it grosses me out now. (And don't even get me started on the platform it has become for all the predatory MLM cults that sadly so many of my "friends" have drunk the koolaid over...this is my blog, I get to be honest here.)

But there's still a tension.  Social media is not without helpful, meaningful connection, and that's why I never manage to fully disconnect.  I post about grief and anxiety, and a small number of individuals respond that these posts are truly helpful to them.  And that gives me a sense of meaning and purpose.  I am genuinely delighted.  I'm not into big numbers, but I am into meaningfulness. So I stay.  Conflicted, I stay.

I'm not ever sure if it's worth it.  I post something funny, and someone takes it too seriously, and I come out of my skin.  I post something serious, and someone gives platitudes, and I want to wring their neck.  I post something imperfect, and someone demands perfection from me, and I want to shred them.  Is this worth the dear folks who understand?  It has been.  Or I've told myself so. I'm not sure if it will continue to be.

To share my grief on public platforms has been helpful to many, but it also exposes me to more people who see my grief as a problem to be solved and to spew unsolicited advice and platitudes at me, or who attach themselves to my coattails to try to piggyback their way to healing and wholeness. In an effort to take back control of my terrain, I've been actively blocking people.  (There will probably be much more of this to come.) People who don't need to know what I'm doing or thinking, people who I never hope to see again in real life, people who really were terrible to me and I don't need in my "audience." I don't know...is that a solution? It gets tricky, because so many of my connections are interconnected.  Inevitably, feelings will be hurt.  But their feelings are not my burden. (Or so I repeat to my recovering codependent self often.)

All this to come, really, to no meaningful conclusion.  I mostly write because I know other people are having the same experience as me without voicing it, and if I've learned anything in 43 years, it's that there is great power in connecting over shared experiences, when someone else says, "Me too!", in having feelings and experiences normalized for you.  So that's usually my goal.

Another potential solution is this blog, to express myself here as an avenue of connection that's more private.  I can still put some meaningful content "out there," but there will be a natural selection process of who interacts with it, since most people won't even take the time to fully read a three-sentence social media post, let alone a blog post of many paragraphs.  A natural weeding out of the TL;DR folks.

I don't know.  I don't know much.  I just know the fakeness wears me down fast, especially in a time when I have next-to-nothing to offer as far as emotional energy anyway.  So for now, I've just pulled really hard back on the reins of my involvement on those platforms, as I re-evaluate my participation and try to make a healthier way forward.