Mind Retrofit

It has been over a year that I have been on facebook. I enjoyed being part of a virtual world with people from my past and seeing what they are up to now. I enjoyed being connected with family and current friends. I enjoyed seeing pictures and sharing mine. I was a bit apprehensive in confirming friends with certain people but I went ahead, second guessing my gut feeling. I have limited my friends and purposefully not requested to be friends with a large amount of people from my past even though I have looked them up to see if they were on facebook. There are several reasons for me not requesting friend status with these people and even blocking a few.

I will make a short list so I can try to stay focused, direct and try to limit myself from getting into side stories.

1. I do not know how they are going to respond to my friend request.

2. I am not sure I really want them to know anything about me.

3. They have confused me, hurt me, caused me a great deal of stress and caused me to question myself in the past.

4. I don’t really think that we are friends.

5. If they did confirm, I really wouldn’t know why.  Were we ever really friends?

6. I use Face Book as a means to have virtual relationships with people to make me more comfortable.

Those are some of the reasons I have come up.

I have those issues and now what has happened is my anxiety level has risen with facebook. In the last few months I have become obsessive about checking everyone’s status. I have started thinking in terms of “I can post that on facebook”. My life turned into a constant thinking process of FB status updates. Whatever I learned, felt, saw, did, what the kids were doing, what David was doing and what the cat was doing started to become status updates in my head and I felt I had to post them because of course everyone else wants to read what I have to say. Wrong!

I have another factor for my anxiety that has hit an all time high, confusion.

Yes, I have become extremely confused by the behavior of other people, the way they respond to my status updates and the fact that family members seem to care less about anything going on with my family. Those things confuse me. I would go into detail about family members but it is really pointless, I may sound like a complete fool so I will just say that their actions, non-responses, constant self centeredness, and lack of caring leave me hurt and confused. This brings about anxiety because I begin to go over in my head what I could have done wrong.

What in the world did I do to them?

Why, do they ignore my emails, my comments on their page, my pictures and the goings on in our life? Then I come full circle and remember it has always been this way and that is one of the reasons I had nothing to do with them for so long. After I go through everything and I am very sure there is absolutely nothing that I did wrong, I get angry. I came to the conclusion almost two weeks ago that I needed to do a personal intervention and detox from facebook. I find it very appropriate timing with the devastation in Haiti, I would most likely be offended at posts that may be incredibly shallow or if they said something like God allowed this for such and such reason, those things really get me angry.

I am feeling very good.

I am finding that I indeed was fixated on facebook, looking at the photos, searching for people who popped in my head, going to people’s pages and seeing what they were up to. I also realized I was doing this to escape. Since the holidays I have been fixated on FB, I believe I was using this to try to stem. I needed something to fixate on because I was having a hard time dealing with Daniel having a hard time. He couldn’t find his peace and I was seeking mine. I do find peace in researching people.

The intelligent people who I respect on FB tend to join really good groups or they put up interesting status updates that I can research.

That is what I found myself doing for the past two months, researching information, people, and anything else I could find to feed my brain the constant information input it needed to stay calm. I wasn’t able to focus on the normal blogs or other sites I frequent for some reason. I am not staying away from FB forever, just until I am in my routine again and able to just go on and not worry about what I write, try to figure out what others mean, or why they would post a photo of themselves doing that for the whole world to see. If I can go back to using it as a helpful resource for me to interact with people comfortably than I think it will be fine.

Is it wrong to de-friend family members? Just curious.