No I Won’t follow you on FB
Last year,2017, was one of spikes and drops as I came to figure out how to live with anxiety-depression. 2016 was just a nightmare. . . so I tried to fix myself.
As my grandmother dealt with depression, before the age of SSRIs. . . she took B12 shots and took Elavil, my mother was not supportive. . . with all her own medical issues (real ones) she could never forgive her mother for being depressed. I’m more like my mother’s mother even if my siblings don’t think so. I’ve come to love the song by Shawn Mendes, “In My Blood”. . .I’m not giving up, it isn’t in my blood.
Last year I tried to manage my relationship with FB: not on my phone, only at home, in the morning or before dinner. I shared this delima with a number of friends and strangers. Last April, a woman who is almost family texted me 25 times in anger because I was depressed and needed help. She didn’t help and I needed to put her on a shelf like a lovely china doll. I don’t go there anymore, and that one-sided blast taught me to shut up about FB because no one younger than 50 understood me and noone over 50 understood either.
I was an early FB friend. I like the pokes to shy friends. I had cancer and stuck at home FB was an wonderful entre to humans! My poet friends and mentor, new poet friends, old high school friends showed up. . . in Toronto I became friends, first with a writer named Jake. He had a personal issue he shared with me privately, and in the ensuing years, his family-tribe became real humans in my life. I introduced his wife to my sister-in-law to help with school bullies. I poked his wife as she was shy, she and I did Duolingo together for a while. Then FB got big. And bigger. And well there was this presidential election and I watched my happy neighborhood get dark and angry.
I saw what Zuck, and who ever worked there, was not doing. There was no humanity in the feed. The news. The mess. . . and I reached out to real humans who I know have skin and bones. I cried out. I saw them in bars or grocery stores and they said, “What can I do?”
Nothing apparently, they could do nothing. No nice notes on my wall. No happy baby photos. I have learned that my political POV would be ignored by any and all friends because the algorithms boxed me in, no one saw the posts. And so I believed I was ‘too much’.
It took three times before I put down FB for good. I watched the Zuck testify before Congress, he smirked and the Senators didn’t actually use social media so they were clueless. It was a sham and disgrace. And boy did the media try to get a handle on this greased pig (forgive the mixed metaphor). I watched Mrs Zuck on PBS Newshour. And man was she schooled. Her voice was pitched low and pleasant, she dropped her head, she gently talked over the reporter and the result was, Mrs Zuck had PBS eating out of her manicured, perfectly moisturized, Palo Alto hand.
I started 2018 deciding to be better. To do this last hard thing: not let my anxiety-depression rule my life. I cried my last Christmas. I mourned my other life and decided I had to make myself content with the world as it is. And I knew, for me, it meant leaving FB. There are many articles out there about social media and depression. You can find them for yourselves.
The risks and my truth is, unless I email someone from FB, I will not hear from them unless I’ve known them for over ten years. All of a sudden there is time on my hands, so I read. I’m a photographer and poet, so I kept my Instagram acct. . . because I love photography, not because anyone likes me. And if Medium is social media, well I’m here.
With net-neutrality gone, with the silver-plated truths from all things FB, the millions and millions of money it makes, Facebook should be regulated by the FCC. There’s something rather fascist about algorithms and bots let loose to define how we are supposed to respond. . . computers, AI will never be human. There are very, very rich humans, with very little real life experience, who don’t care about the rest of us.
Think about it this way, everyone is re-reading “1984” and say they find it too real and scary. So who is Big Brother now? Poke.
