...is to stop being a social media hermit.
So I deactivated my Facebook about 10 months ago because it
worsened all the already painful problems in my life. Kinda like putting a
magnifying glass to an ant on a sunny day.
Then I stopped blogging. I don’t know why. A friend of
mine once warned me to NEVER blog about how you don’t blog enough, but I’m
doing it anyway. Because it’s actually hilarious, when you don’t keep up your
blog it becomes the spawning ground for spam comments (who knew?!). Comments
used to give me a thrill. But then I wrote this one really upsetting post awhile
ago in which I basically just sobbed all over the internets, and the first
comment I got was from Viagra Online. That really messed me up. Now I get
comments DAILY from oh, I dunno, maybe “Free Cambodian Dating”? Or, better yet,
just plain 'ol “Boobs”? It just feels so violating, like someone spray-painting your baby’s
face.
Then I tried to replace blogging and Facebooking with
Twittering. It didn’t work. I’m going to say something now, something that may
shock and offend. Twitter sucks. It’s boring and stupid. I have an account, I guess
I’m pretty active on it or whatever, but it’s useless. If I’m going to blog,
I’ll blog. If I’m going to write status updates with links for my friends, I’ll
do that on Facebook (or even AIM for that matter). Twitter just adds nothing. I
got jazzed about Twitter exactly once, and that was when Robert DeNiro
responded to one of my tweets. But then it turned out it wasn’t the real Bobby. Of course it wasn’t.
Freakin’ Twitter.
So here’s the part where I admit some hard truths. Here we
go:
I get lonely without social media. And not just any social
media. MY social media. Twitter never felt like mine, but rather a hodgepodge
of many people’s one-liners. Flickr was never mine either—I don’t want my
photos searchable on Google Images. LinkedIn has always been fine, but that’s
my WORK place, ya know?
I miss blogging. But when you stop, it’s really hard to
start again. It’s like, if you haven’t written in awhile you feel like your next post has to be THE BEST. And then you get freaked, because you have no ideas
that can live up to that. And then
you feel like you just have no ideas AT ALL. I guess that’s called writer’s
block, or blogger’s block, or something.
And, yes, I miss Facebook (picture me cringing as I write
this next bit, ok?). The truth is, I’m severely saddened that no one knows my
favorite movies anymore. Or my favorite quotes. They’ve changed in the last 10
months, and no one knows because I don’t have a stupid Facebook account. Also,
I so much miss exclaiming “new profile pic!” after a fun night out. And speaking
of photos, my new ones have no home without Facebook. They sit in iPhotos, all
lonely and lifeless with no comments or thumbs up. Poor photos. Maybe it's juvenile, but it’s almost
like deactivating one’s Facebook profile disappears a huge chunk of one’s
social life.
So I’m going to start blogging more. About whatever. Even if
I have no ideas, I’ll just write about Tiger Woods or something.
I’m also going to reactivate my Facebook account sometime
soon. It’s so scary, because I deactivated during one of the hardest times of
my life. So my profile is like a time capsule of crap-land. But I gotta get
over it. Not to say I’ll never deactivate again (I most certainly will if I
feel the need), but I think now it’s about time I reentered the social media
world. Because these late-night convos with my plant (it’s a her and she has a
name and she’s brilliant) are getting pathological.
Social Networks
Via BuzzFeed