I mention facebook the most when I refer to social media because it is the social media site that I happen to use the most. I also believe that it is one of the worst culprits of social media anxiety disorder. Facebook literally lays out a timeline of perpetual one-upsmanship where each person can paint their life in the most wonderful light whether it really is or not. If you are on the side of having that fabulous life to share with everyone, good for you. If you are one of the majority of people out there who struggle in life, it sucks to be you.
But no matter what side of the coin you are on, it seems that many of us are powerless to fight the digital age of friendship where esteem is held in "likes" and "shares". It drives me insane sometimes that people are no longer expected to practice basic social manners because so many of us do all of our socialization from behind a computer screen.
So how often do I participate in social media? Constantly! I am a rather isolated stay at home mother. I spend entire days on facebook. Most days, it's my only adult conversation and in a way it is like having constant conversation with those I frequently interact with and I truly enjoy that. These days I use social media as a method of furthering my goals. To promote my Etsy shop, and to promote my free lance photography gigs. To post these blogs so someone other than myself reads them. Now I deal with a whole new social media dynamic and that is the self righteous anti-social media snob. People tell me all the time that I am on facebook too much. It's kind of like those people who are so much more enlightened because they don't have a television. I don't know how many times I have heard someone exclaim to me "I barely even go on facebook anymore" as if their life has reached some kind of higher status than mine and they no longer have to deal with communication with all the poor schmucks who have such pathetic lives that they have to resort to facebook for social interaction. I end up defending myself because people think of me as some kind of freak spending all my time in a dark room choosing not to live, but to be a pathetic computer addicted loser. At least I know that this is not how things are at all. Social media has a purpose in my life, and I used it for that purpose. But there was a time when I went through a serious bout of social media anxiety disorder.
It was just a few years ago, and I was living far away from all of my friends. I was not making new friends where I was living and my only social outlet at all was on facebook. Day after day I would look at everyone's pictures of their fun times. I would read their statuses of how fun last night was or how they were looking forward to this event or that. And I could do nothing but sit there and absorb it all knowing that I had no one to hang out with. That I had no event to look forward to, or pictures of great times with friends. Eventually it was like it started to literally eat my brain. I had no social concept anymore. I became morose and lonely. I started to take it out on my own self-esteem. Suddenly it was not that I was isolated. It was not my situation. It was me. I was forgotten. I was unliked. I was unworthy of the friendship that I saw everyone else having but could not forge for myself. I came to believe that everyone around me was creating and maintaining these connections with their fellow human beings. Connections that I had ceased to be able to make.
I became a stalker because on facebook it's hard not to be a stalker. It kind of comes with the territory. I started making note of the people who would "like" my posts and those who never did. I started making note of those who would comment and those who never did. Eventually there was this sick kind of tally in my head where I started to measure who really cared about me and who didn't by who was present, not in my real life, but on facebook. Maybe it was because there were so few people in my real life. Living in a town where it seemed impossible to make friends didn't seem to help much. I would run into old friends from high school. New people through my kid's school and in our giant apartment complex. But none of them ever wanted to actually hang out with me, or talk to me. The only time we interacted was on facebook. Of course this only furthered my feelings of inadequacy. My old friends weren't talking to me in real life, and my new ones weren't either. I remember sitting there in lonely desperation thinking "What the hell is wrong with me?!"
The worst part became when I started to use social media to express my extreme loneliness and despair. In my mind I was desperately reaching out for companionship. Or at least for someone to acknowledge my loneliness. In reality I was coming across like a whining needy fool. And then people started to defriend me. Of course, since I had all these running totals of facebook social interactions in my head, I knew whenever someone defriended me, and it made things so much worse. What? Did I have some kind of social plague that sent people running for the hills? I guess in a way I did. But it was a self induced plague.
Eventually I ended up losing my two best friends for good. Although we are trying to repair our friendships now, almost 3 years later, they will never be the same. We may never even get past the acquaintance stage of things. Social media anxiety disorder cost me my dearest friendships. And it cost me myself for a while there.
Social media anxiety disorder is a real thing. As the years go on, I hear more and more people describing the same things I went through when I was in the throes of it. The best way to describe what causes social media anxiety disorder is that you are judging your everyday life compared to everyone else's highlight reel. Sometimes it's like facebook is just one giant contest to see who has the best life. And the more people post those fabulous highlights, the more we forget that they have bad times too.
So if you are going through any of what I have described here. If logging on to social media websites causes you to feel worse about yourself and your own life, find something off of the computer to do. Find a different hobby. Instead of facebook messaging your friend, call them. Make plans to see people in real life. The most important thing is to acknowledge that it exists, because only then can you make efforts to change it.
Because in the grand scheme of life, social media is just words on a screen. There's so much more to life, but sometimes we forget that. I know for a long time I did.
