Tag: social media

Getting Past your Past (Ex’s, Social Media)

Anna Akana was one of the first YouTubers that I actually began following when I first had my depression diagnosis. She was very frank and honest about her difference experiences and her advice, almost always punctuated with humor was easy for me to access.

It sounds so easy to simply say “Don’t think about your ex” but in a world of social media that’s actually harder than it is. Anna’s advice is on point here but I thought I’d expand upon it. During the start of my divorce there were certainly those feelings that I wanted to know what was going on as my ex and I were preparing to end our marriage. I realized that just having my social media profile meant having connections to her, the guy she was seeing and our old circle of friends. I had to make the blunt choice to simply get rid of all my social media and change how I used any form of it. Gone were my FB, my Google+ accounts, Twitter and the like. Eventually I found myself with just two main types of social media accounts, a Reddit to read up about subjects I still had an interest in, and Instagram. Unlike my FB days though my IG was private and mostly used to track news, products or things relating to my growing interest in target shooting.

Over time though I realized that creating a more isolated social media presence had also helped me to make the break from my ex-wife. I wasn’t tempted to login to social media and see what was going on. Her life was hers and mine was mine. Rebuilding could go on for both of us and neither of us had any reason to know what was going on in the other’s life. These days while I sometimes miss being ‘in the know’ with some of my friends (hrm maybe friends is a stretch) I find that it’s forced me to do one of the things I hate. I have to actual be social and engage in conversation. It seems silly to think of that as something novel but the reality is I don’t passively observe in people’s lives these days. I have to go out of my way to see how they are. In some cases it’s helpful, there’s a subset of my old circles that genuinely do enjoy telling me about the goings on of their lives. Then again I suspect for some people it’s frustrating that I’m not “aware of what’s going on in XYZ’s life”.

Getting over an ex, be it boyfriend/girlfriend or worse, an ex-spouse takes time. You can go about it in any number of ways but knowing how to avoid the social media trap and letting them have their life is a big first step. If you’re having a hard time with it, considering deactivating your accounts for a short time or learning to filter content to avoid triggering painful memories. You can get through it, it won’t be fun, but it can be made easier.

Caliber or Quantity – Friendships and Clinical Depression

Shortly after my divorce one of the first things I did was shut off social media. Besides the usual barrage of questions I realized that most of my circle were really tied to my ex-wife and the stress of contact was too much for me to deal with.

As I’ve slowly reached back out to some of the people I felt close to I realized that there’s a trend towards quantity of friends versus the caliber of friends. As a target shooter I prefer using caliber than quality, so bear with me. Social media conceptually is a neat idea, I get that. Reconnecting, staying informed about distant friends is all well and good. Somewhere down the line though social media shifted and it became more about the idea of followers or a sense of external validation. Just about every social media structure is about who liked your post or how many re-shares or views you garnered. That’s never appealed to me. The idea that a post is worthy or unworthy of attention or comment has always seemed weird. While these days my social media foot print is extremely small and very curated. I’d like to think that now in my forties I’ve come to believe that it’s the degree of closeness with my circle that’s been more important.

Caliber of friends, not quantity matters more to me. It’s one thing to have 20 friends give you a one word “Nice” to a post and quite a different thing to have someone talk to you about what you wrote or what you re-shared. We’ve lost a bit of that in the social networking world of today. It’s rather ironic for me as I work in a tech related field. When it comes to friendships however even a two sentence followup to me feels better than having any actual number of likes. Don’t get me wrong, in Reddit i almost never down vote anything. If something is genuinely interesting and I think someone else might want to see it, I’ll up vote. Call me karma indiscriminate if you want but if that up vote makes someone else that I don’t know happy, then hey what’s the harm.

Navigating any social networking space with depression feels like a game of minesweeper.  There was a time that I enjoyed reading about anime, photography etc, then I realized those environments would trigger negative thinking and memories of my married life. Things I had no want to revisit. These days I don’t think of just random people who engage me online as ‘friends’, they are contacts, acquaintances . Like minded they may be but we don’t have any deeper degree of interaction. This change in how I treat the online community has made a world of difference for me. I choose to engage people and it lets me focus on the content and sincerity of the conversations.

Life is hard enough juggling mental health in any form. While the online world can be a useful resource and sometimes an escape hatch, it’s also full of potential hazards. Finding an efficient way to navigate it will always be a challenge. If you’re finding those types of communities are pushing you into a dark place, take that step back, look at filtering the information you subject yourself to. Here’s hoping you are able to find a good corner of the net to call your own.

 

News and Triggering

There was a time that I used to be a veritable information processing fiend.  I always wanted to know everything about the world around me. Anecdotes, blogs, news articles you name it, I’d want to read it.  As depression began to settle in however I found myself getting sad any time I brought up a news site.

For me a lot of my anxiety and depression often takes the form of obsessing over details or things I can’t change. That sort of behavior loops and triggers other worse things in my case like insomnia. There are other side effects though of the constant bombardment with negative news that’s made headlines the last few years.

Huffington Post article on the matter. The aspect that we are naturally negative biased is a frightening one. It makes me concerned as mainstream media plays upon that response in how they present. One of the harsh realities of the US news in particular has been how quickly news about shootings and other gun violence propagates. For me as a gun owner it’s been particularly painful seeing the significant uptick in mass shootings.

It’s a difficult transition but I limit my news intake, I started to filter my sources more. Critically I try to balance whatever I read online that’s negative with things that are uplifting.  Be it animals, positive themed messages or stories of people helping the world rather than hurting it. The human mind does have a bias, but you can take steps to insure that your propensity towards it is kept as low as possible.

 

Kissing Social Media Goodbye aka Fuck Facebook

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.