Being Alone: Drop Facebook for a While
To really get what Facebook did to me, and how it fed my delusions, you'd probably need to sit in on one of my advocate talks or the young adults group I help out with when I have the time. The short version: I've been off Facebook for close to six months. You can live without an account and feel fine about it even when everyone in your family and all your friends still have theirs. Staying current with people's lives gets harder, sure. But I came to see that scrolling a screen to track what everybody is up to wasn't doing me any good.
The newsfeed used to be my favorite thing. Something would pop up and I'd feel plugged in. Given my history with the site, though, I had to find other ways to reach people, and those ways turned out to be better for me. I was a profile stalker, especially of guys I had crushes on. The unsettling part is how much people volunteer about themselves, and whatever they leave out you can usually pry loose over chat, building a little private read on someone from a distance.
Face-to-face still has something the screen can't touch. So maybe I'm a thousand years behind on the news that Natalie went to Spain, or Cassie got married, or Erin dropped a big deer in her backyard and plans to eat it for lunch, or Shaun wired a new DVD player into his new sound system. Fine. I'm a late bloomer socially now, and it doesn't bother me. Giving up Facebook, Twitter, and a couple of others was the right call for my sanity. I was an addict. I didn't see it then. I see it clearly now, and I know how near I came to a place I might never have walked back from.
So much of what we do leans on another person's input. We want advice before any big decision, which makes sense, but if you look closely you'll notice we almost never decide anything entirely on our own. Mental illness changes that math. Like it or not, you end up making a fair number of calls by yourself when it comes to your treatment and your own care. I'd wager plenty of you have hit that maddening moment of wanting advice from someone who simply has nothing to offer you.
If you live with mental illness, even if you're still on Facebook, odds are the illness has done you some good in a roundabout way. If nothing else it should push you toward independence. And if it hasn't yet, that independence hasn't gone anywhere. It's been sitting right in front of you, waiting to be claimed. Same goes for the rest of your life. It's available; we just have to pick the moment to take it.
Facebook keeps us company when no one is physically around during the day. But the belief that we need people or some social hum near us every waking hour is not a thing we should be this hooked on. I'm not trashing social life. I can be manic sometimes, and even when I'm steady I love being around people, because it shields me from depression when I'm sliding into a low. Being social matters; it's part of how we grow as individuals.
What Facebook refuses to give is solitude. Life doesn't either. We all run around doing our business, and the breaks we grab aren't the kind of rest the mind, body, or soul actually needs to recharge. Take bipolar, for instance. The brain runs hot, so during the well stretches a person learns fast how much self-care matters and how real the practice of mindfulness has to be. Grounding yourself back to reality, tending your mood, keeping up what you might call mood hygiene: that's the work.
We don't have to stay wired to the people we've decided are modeling the correct way to live in order to stay sane. The illness, oddly enough, hands us permission to soak in who we are and no one else. Sit with your own situation long enough and I promise you'll find out what a strangely personal relationship you can have with your own brain. - Susan Page