Last year I took a total Facebook hiatus (trendy, I know). For about 8 months I let my Facebook lie fallow, checking it only a handful of times. I had come to a point where my interactions with Facebook were having an extremely negative impact on my life. I was spending ridiculous amounts of time on the site even when my intention was just to check in with one specific person or post a picture. Inevitably I would get caught up in the never-ending, always growing feed and spend 45 minutes or an hour scrolling with an ever-increasing sense of frustration, my mind engaged in a ridiculous battle: "Get off now! This is a wasteful time suck!" says one part of my brain. "In just a minute, I have to read this post!" says another. Meanwhile, my children were vying for my attention, to my extreme annoyance. When I would finally wrench myself from the phone or computer I was angry and disoriented, yelling at my kids and raging through the house. Interestingly, it was not necessarily the content causing me the problem - I curated my friend list and feed pretty intensely, and hid posts which I knew would enrage me. For me, it's partially about a neurological sensitivity to electronic stimuli. Watching TV or endlessly pinning recipes does the same thing.
It wasn't until my recent return to Facebook that I realized another component of my online interactions that was contributing to my cycle of rage and ennui. It was all just so shallow. My digital interactions lacked the heart and grit of my real life conversations, debates, fights, classes. I was avoiding uncomfortable conversations, hiding posts that seemed to reek with impossibly entrenched views that differed from mine, worrying about how family members of differing sociopolitical identities would respond to the links I shared and how this would affect my in person time with them. It was exhausting and depressing.
During my online sabbatical I took the time to really nurture my relationships with my children and family. I continued to receive counseling from a wonderful, courageous therapist, and our work together focused on mindfulness and willingness to fully experience uncomfortable thoughts and feelings rather than avoid them. I had lengthy, rambling, open-ended, meaningful conversations with my husband and siblings and parents and in-laws and friends on conservation, religion, social justice, equality, economics, science, parenting, art, love, and the difficulties of being human. I spent a lot more time actually living my life, on purpose, than I had before.
I don't know exactly what brought me back into online activity. I'm sure it was partially the arrival of my birthday. Who doesn't want to see a page full of well wishes just for them? I had some lovely brief conversations with friends and jumped back in to the amazing, fraught world of online personhood. And I started to join my husband in his self-assigned role as Facebook fact checker and guardian of logic. Oh, how I love his fierce insistence on good logic, good research, and good science. It's
super sexy. I also love how he unabashedly exercises this role in a gentle manner with his closest friends and family. Over the past few years he's somehow been able to shed most of his self-consciousness about how the expression of his beliefs might affect his relationships. It's still scary, and he still gets nauseated when he's about to enter the fray, but
he does it anyway.
I wanted to take this practice into my online life too. Recently I had that opportunity in a big way. I posted a petition to change the blood donation guidelines for men who have sex with men. Last year the guidelines were changed from a lifetime ban to a 1-year period of abstinence before being eligible for donation. The recent shooting at Pulse brought the issue to the forefront as men in the LGBTQ community expressed a desire to donate blood, and the ethical and medical appropriateness of the donation guidelines came into question.
The petition I signed was phrased poorly, making implications based on questionable logic. It stated that banning blood donations for this group implies a false belief that homosexuality is transferable by blood. I was incredibly frustrated by this, but signed anyway as I am in favor of reevaluating the criteria. I was nervous about posting this, suspecting that many of my friends and family would be affronted by this showing up on my feed. A friend (Hi Friend!) left a respectful post disagreeing with both the allegations made in the petition for the reason for the ban, and with the need to evaluate it, stating that the guidelines are in place to reduce the risk of HIV positive blood getting into the donor blood pool. And of course I'm also totally for keeping HIV positive blood out of the donor blood pool. I had just looked up CDC statistics on the new diagnoses of HIV by group and in my late night stupor confused CDC, Center for Disease Control, for CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. For some reason (exhaustion, anyone?) it didn't occur to me to question why the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation would be publishing HIV statistics. I posted something about how, yes, based on the data for Canada (still so embarrassed about that!) the 1-year deferral made sense. I went to bed, somewhat queasy about the whole thing, wondering whether I should just delete it all, and didn't look at my feed for a day or so.
If you want to start a firestorm, post something at the intersection of Islamic radicalism, HIV, and social justice right after a major massacre during an election year, and then leave your page alone for awhile. I was first alerted that things had passed from civil to cranky to adversarial by my husband. After his off-handed comment about the war on my wall, or something to that effect, I opened the app with dread. Sure enough, my sister who is a sociology major and queer (Hi Sis!) had gotten into the discussion, and my friend had posted some really bad, biased data on how homosexual males are promiscuous, as well as posting the CDC data I'd looked at earlier (go Canadian TV!) and then in the ensuing argument there was some confusion where Sis was attacking the data on homosexual promiscuity and the logic skills of the friend while the friend (and another friend who came to the her defense) thought Sis was attacking the CDC data, and it got a lot less civil.
As I read through this, I had to keep remembering to breathe. I would literally find myself holding my breath. My gut was churning and there was this uncomfortable, electric burning in my chest. I really just wanted to go hide. Someone else had joined in with some great data and wonderful articles, all of which I read, and which continued to inform my understanding of the medical safety issues at the heart of this as it unfolded. I think that one continuous voice was what kept me from just deleting the whole thing and moving to Alaska.
Meanwhile, my husband was at the airport on the way back to his temporary home in Florida, having forgotten his car keys. I had checked my Facebook while he was driving to the airport, and seen this just get more and more awful. So despite my absolute hatred of speeding, I'm racing down the freeway at * miles per hour (the asterisk is to maintain plausible deniability) so that I can get his keys to him before his plane leaves, all the while completely unable to stop thinking about this. Trying to figure out how to show my love to all the very different people who had commented on this. Trying to figure out how to help my husband get to his place an hour away from the airport if I didn't get the keys back in time. Wondering how I could promote peace without having to referee. Trying to keep my lunch down.
We did, indeed, get the keys to my darling before his plane left, and I did, indeed, find a way to make a stance that promoted my values in regards to this issue and in regards to my relationships. I spent literally 90 minutes writing that post, in a word doc (Note: never type anything of importance directly into Facebook or any other other website - it will either post before you want it to and add fuel to the fire, or the internet will eat your hour of work and you will cry bitter, salty tears). It was with gratitude and excitement that I saw the positive, tender-hearted responses.
Something that was, for a time, an extremely uncomfortable and scary interaction had transformed
into a concrete example of my success in living mindfully in the service of my values. Compassion, reason, and the willingness to be with my discomfort and with the discomfort of my loved ones created a meaningful experience of great magnitude.
Hence the new blog. I declare my commitment to be willing to share all of myself --joy, shame, fear, anger, humor, frustration, passion, imperfection -- online and off. I'd love it if you would join me on the journey.
Sarah
