Nope, not that eff-word. I love that eff-word – where would we be without it’s delightfully releasing fricative force?
I’m talking about Facebook. Bane of my life and perverter of otherwise normal days into wasted little husks.
Reasons why I (tell myself that I) keep Facebook in my life:
1) The photos. I am a huge traveller and I love that most people post photos from their various travels. It’s a great way to get insight or inspiration when trip-planning. Similarly, I love being able to post my photos from trips I’ve taken so that my family and friends don’t have to sit down for a boring slideshow in order for me to let them know how my trip was.
2) Keeping in touch with people I genuinely care about. This is actually a secondary reason to the photos one, because I could obviously just shoot off emails to them. But of the people I’d like to stay in touch with on facebook, there are very few that I’d actually email (chances are I don’t even have their emails): distant cousins, childhood playmates, friends of your parents, etc. etc.
*shameful reason* 3) I’m terrified of being “left out” if I left Facebook. I’m not exactly a social butterfly anymore, so if I wasn’t able to see all the “group invites/events,” it’s possible people wouldn’t think to invite me to anything via other methods of communication. At least that’s my paranoid thought process, much as I hate to admit it.
The reasons I should leave Facebook are way too numerous to mention, so I won’t list them out. But anyone can easily think what they are. Aside from the sheer number of wasted hours you can spend with your eyes glued to a little screen taking in oddly addictive information that you don’t actually care about (ummm sadly kind of the story of the Internet, in general, for me), Facebook and all its stupid, stupid little trivial dramas can ruin my mood. Just shatter it. And I really don’t like the person I am when I’m in its thrall.
A very real and recent example: me logging into the eff-word to find that one of my best (albeit now far-off) friends is in touch with someone who hurt me very badly in the past. In fact, she’s evidently more ‘in touch’ with him than she is with me, as they were chumming it up in some recent photos while she hasn’t seen fit to return any of my emails for a few months now. Ouch.
My reaction? Delete. Cut out the friendship entirely in a very silly and immature way. This is someone who I feel deserves an explanation – but she hasn’t asked for one (so now I’ve added to this equation the stress of not knowing what she even knows!). If it weren’t for Facebook, sure I could have found out that my friend had ‘betrayed’ me from some other source, but there’s a good chance I would have found out from her, accompanied by some kind of explanation.
Aside from the unnecessary downer/drama aspect of Facebook, the comparison aspect kills me as well. Whether or not we’ll all admit it, we all know that Facebook’s primary reason for existence is to compare ourselves to other people – consciously or unconsciously. Examples:
“OMG they’re on their fourth kid and they have a body like Kate Moss!?!? How is this possible?!” (implicit thought process: I’m fat and ugly and I don’t even have any kids to justify it).
“OMG they finished that PhD they were working on and now they’ve bought their first home” (implicit thought process: I’m stupid and my life sucks compared to everyone else’s.)
Be honest: how many Facebook photos have you posted with the knowledge that “this will make people jealous of me/my life”? For me, it’s a lot. A hell of a lot. Admitting that disgusts me and fills me with deep self-loathing. I feel shallow and pathetic. I do not want to want to make other people jealous of me – which obviously smacks of insecurity. And the irony is, by engaging in this process myself, I should be realizing that people ALL do this on Facebook – including all the people I feel so jealous of sometimes. They ALL work to present a version of themselves/their lives that other people will be impressed with.
There are a number of recent articles on the explosion of mental health issues related to Facebook, and one I read made the excellent point that Facebook is a “best of” reel of each user’s life. It’s like a little movie we each work so hard to compile and edit (and edit and edit and edit) in order to feel validated by other’s people’s respect or admiration.
The problem is that all of this is a presentation. Like the beautiful but miserable celebrity head-case who is glorified as “naturally beautiful” after hundreds of dollars of fake hair dye, make up, plastic surgery and expensive clothes, you know deep down that it’s all just a presentation. And you can never ever feel happy or validated if all you’re exposing for validation is, essentially, a lie.
The only way to break the cycle is to present the truth – the whole truth. But Facebook is SO not the venue for that either! None of us want to be that sad-ass person who posts their every emotion and juvenile mood-swing on Facebook (or, for that matter, displays them in real life all the time either). That just reeks of an equally pathetic type of insecurity.
The real solution? Self-validation.
I am on the “self-validation” unit of my DBT group which is why this topic is particularly important to me at the moment. Self-validation is the answer to so many BPD problems – but it’s incredibly difficult and deeply counterintuitive if you’ve spend years looking to everyone else to make you feel happy/confident/safe/functional etc etc.
Self-validation means a quiet inner assurance that what you are feeling is real, logical, understandable and important. To say that in my mind – let alone out loud – is SO HARD. I don’t like myself enough to self-validate, and I simultaneously don’t like that feeling of “letting other people off the hook” (if you know what I mean) by keeping the struggle inside and not putting the burden of it on others’ shoulders. Which is clearly why self-validating essential and I have to learn to do it! :-S
Without self-validation, you’re overcome with the desire to “act out” what you’re feeling, at any cost, in order to make people realize and validate just how terrible things are for you. When BPDers don’t get “enough” of a reaction to how they’re feeling, they may purposely embellish the problems they have in order to manipulate that validation out of people: they may develop obvious self-harm mechanisms, or even make up “traumatic events” from their past in order to get the reaction they want to their pain. But by doing so, we’re caught in an even worse spot: now we only get validated for the lies/performances/tricks/manipulations we use, and not the actual emotions. And so, the more you have to rely on the lies and performances, and the less real/validated your pain feels, and on and on it goes.
Oh foolish, foolish borderlines, when will ye (or rather, ‘we’) learn?
The old me would have said “never.” The me of even a mere six months ago would have said that. But I’m tentatively being able to consider the possibility of change. I hate these patterns. I hate these coping “tools.” I hate the person that they make me and the effect they have had on my life. Now it’s time to transform that hate (negativity) into growth (positivity) by using it to spur me onwards in the daunting quest for change. I’ve written the following little mantra for myself *squirms with self-consciousness* when I start to feel horrendous emotions or my BPD mode kicking in as a result:
Every hateful and counterproductive BPD “technique” I’ve developed has developed for a good reason: to protect me. However, those techniques are not protecting me anymore – they are hurting me. As I open myself to start feeling emotions, I will take a pause with each one to remember that it is real, important and valid. I deserve to feel everything that I feel, and no one has the power to make me feel otherwise.
Have you ever vowed to give up Facebook? Or even succeeded? And do you self-validate? How?
Cat xx
Half of a Soul - Life with BPD 