you’ve heard of people who can’t take their liquor, nicotine, THC or coffee perhaps. What I haven’t heard of until it happened to me is someone who couldn’t take social media.
This is 24 hours in the making, I made an initial emotional post about it… which didn’t actually talk about the direction I feel the need to prune in. It was about something I saw on social media, something sufficiently upsetting I won’t be revisiting it. It’s within the black box of a thing I don’t feel safe with in my life anymore; Twitter.
Now this isn’t the first social media I’ve cut out. I cut out Myspace way long ago, though that was for lack of stimulation, nearly the opposite of why I’m doing this today. Facebook is a much closer use case, during my first major breakdown of my adult life, I spent a lot of time on Facebook, what with the games and so on. It took a sustained period of me seeing it harm my health before I finally cut it out, nearly for good. I spend a few minutes on Facebook a week at most, to check messages. Now Twitter is in the same box.
It’s a rough thing, because I know I liked the dopamine hit. I felt less alone using it, and feeling alone is a major part of my depression. But the emotionally manipulative nature was too much. The specific thing I saw I don’t want to desensitize to the point of being okay with. In the breakdown that followed I jammed my right hand pinky finger…. it still hurts, a reasonable reminder that this is the time to stop.
So, I’m more disconnected, more alone. It is what has to be done, to keep me alive, which at least according to some people is an important goal. There are games I can’t play as well, because of the habit forming nature…. time to break the habit, find new things to do with my time.
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You are not alone. I had to swear off one social media site because it was rejecting my submissions again and again. I could not take it anymore. It was painful indeed. Evil bots you could say.
The other site I had to swear off of was one that was helping me connect with others whose intentions were not in my best interest shall we say. This was painful too.
So painful were these two separations that I now stick to here, where I belong, and dabble a little in other sites where the boundaries are also strong. I do not commit great effort to any site, but what I do commit the most to is this one.
I miss the self I was when I had it….. when I have people to make laugh, I can be quite funny, and I enjoyed that creativity. Like I said though; it is not much of a decision, to live or to laugh. I do wonder though, lacking the audience perhaps I’ll get more into writing again…… seems like uncalled for and unwarranted optimism, but one must always look for silver linings
I missed being able to give a part of me that I wanted to give to one site, but no longer was willing to because of one rejected submission after another. I suppose I could have tolerated the rejections but I was not going to. The bots seemed arbitrary in their algorithms.
The one site where I was meeting people that were just so easy to relate to was great, but some of them wanted things, literally, that were not mine to give. So much for that, that too was sad.
So I put most of my effort that I do put here.