On March 21^st 2018 I wrote the following:

About an hour ago I downloaded Facebook onto my phone. About 2 minutes ago I deleted it.

Within that hour I scrolled through my feed I don’t know how many times and all it did was conjure up horrible feelings and cause the voice in my head to tell me lies. Over the last 2 months I have barely used Facebook. Over the last 2 months I have had a fairly good mental state.

I think it’s safe to say I live a far more contented and positive life without it.

I do not like what it does to me. Yes, it may be where the world is headed. Yes, it can be useful to help people stay in touch. But am I prepared for my mental health to be damaged because of it? I think not! 

I posted it to my Instagram Stories and received 4 responses; 2 implied they agreed with what I’d said and 2 responded with words of similar thought to mine. Before I posted it I had a small debate in my head about whether I should or not. It had the potential to make people think it’s too personal to share. But I think that’s precisely my point. All too often on social media – I think it can happen in real life too – we often post our highlights (leaving others to think we lead a far more exciting and problem-free life than we actually do as well as potentially leading them to play the comparison game) or we tell people in real life that ‘yeah, I’m good thank you’ when really things are utter crap. Now, I’m not saying we need or should tell anyone and everyone absolutely everything all the time. But maybe there should be more of a balance.

I have seen how being real about life offers opportunity and the space for others to be real too. It allows us to have deeper connections with people both in virtual reality and reality reality. It’s ok to say ‘actually, things aren’t so good at the moment’. It’s ok to let people know how you’re really doing.

I know from my own experience how being honest and real, sharing life’s difficulties can be valuable. For example, I compare myself a lot less to those people who I meet up with and know the crap stuff that’s going on compared to those I don’t see and only see their highlights of life. In this day and age where people are connecting less and less on a deeper level I think it’s so important to be real. I’m all for deeper connections with people and I would love to take a trip in the Doctor’s Tardis to the pre-digital/social media age where people communicated via letter or actual face-to-face interaction. But seeing as how I can’t do that, I’ll stick to staying in the present and doing my best to make deeper connections and being honest and real.

If this is something you struggle with or if this post has challenged you, I’d love to know so just leave a comment below.