One of the first things I realized as I went through my divorce was that the circle of friends my ex-wife and I had gathered over 7 years was going to have to change. For me it wasn’t necessarily because I hated the circle of friends but because I knew that dealing w/the fall out from divorce I couldn’t be around a lot of people.
I’m not particularly sociable to begin with which made things like Facebook almost alien to me. I never really cared that much about what everyone else was up to. I always felt those were the things you asked when you were face to face, not because you felt the need to cyber stalk everyone you ever knew.
I want to say that within the first two months of our separation I formally began closing off my profiles and by January I was essentially gone from social media. The possibility of seeing anything associated with my ex-wife was terrifying. I knew she had moved on and as I had asked for discretion and privacy we didn’t make a huge production of it online. So there went Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in an instant.
To me it was empowering in a way. I had gotten rid of the major things that would remind me of my ex-wife. My world shrank and I had to take a hard look at the things I was doing. Escaping into the lives of others wasn’t an option. Neither was getting caught up in the goings on of other people’s lives. Selfishly that also meant nobody could really peer into mine unless I wanted them to.
I didn’t completely remove contact with people, I just reframed the terms of that communication. I found myself reaching out to specific communities designed around helping people battling with depression/anxiety and grief.
If you’ve found that social media has a whole makes you worse off, I do recommend taking a break and focusing on who you are. You can consider groups such as MyCounterPane created by the amazing Kate Milliken(Her story http://bit.ly/2aEKUfS). Or applications with group chat features like Pacifica.
