Social media, perceptions etc…

Having just written how I had said goodbye to it all forever, I briefly returned to Blue Sky, for all of 24 hours, to do some promotional work re the writing and found it a place I definitely don’t feel comfortable in. Deactivated again. Reactivated then my Instagram account. Feeling anxious about it. Prefer having a small following but I don’t think I will stay for very long on Instagram either.

One pitfall of social media is how people judge you on the small fragments you share. When I started, I found myself oversharing and sharing a small sliver of my personality that I don’t normally in real life/offline, I think it was a sort of exaggerated fragment magnified by social media. In the end, this made me feel more and more uncomfortable and I was confronted on one occasion with a person who felt they needed to give me quite a lot of advice which frankly, I felt, didn't apply to me. She had made gross assumptions based on, I think, my social media posts. It was not serious, I appreciated what she was trying to do, but what I perceived as suspicious cynicism also irked me. I would have expected somebody that intelligent to be more understanding, to realise that that there might be reasonable and mature motivations behind certain decisions etc...I felt wilfully misjudged and believed that things I had mentioned had been taken out of context (and what context is there really on social media?!) …Ah, the subtle nuances (complete lack of) of the online world!  I mentioned, for instance, my insomnia on social media on several occasions but why assume it is out of bad habits and not due to health issues, for example? My insomnia had had no impact whatsoever on my work or attendance. If I have worked so hard since my mid-twenties, it is precisely because I did not work hard in my last few years of secondary school and in my first few years of university. Yes, I was also at that time suffering from severe depression, chronic fatigue and worse – my motivation was therefore non-existent – but I also, like most teenagers and young people, partied quite a lot … I think probably far too much, and so by my mid-twenties, with my health vastly improved, and seeing the consequences of those years and the fact that I had not been able to obtain a degree, I threw myself into my work to try and turn my life around. The determination and hard work was very much needed and the progress has been slow with many devastating setbacks. I dislike being urged to slow down when there is so much to do. I read quickly, a skill which took a lot of practice, and I am quick to pick out the essential points of what I have read. I am desperately trying to catch up. I feel like I will never stop trying to catch up. I will never stop trying to remedy the past. However, one thing that I did consider as a result of the conversations that I had with this person was “yes, I work hard but am I working badly, ineffectively?” and I came to the conclusion that yes, I was working badly. Certainly I am not absorbing all the information I wish to or thinking as critically as I would like about what I have read (this is also one of the reasons I have returned to college this year). I should also add that by the time I was thirty, I felt quite severely the dire consequences of too much hard work and little else and I had learned my lesson in the hardest and cruelest way so I feel that I am, twelve years later, fairly balanced about my work life. I take breaks, I relax, I watch movies, I have learned the importance of boundaries etc… 

I think my openness and honesty on social media has cost me as much as it has helped me. It is a sort of poisoned chalice. I have grossly underestimated the level of prejudice and stigma out there, which prevails even in the most well-meaning people.