Im Quitting Social Media… Again… Kinda
So, I’m quitting social media… Again…Kinda.
I actually want to do a bit of an experiment. Though honestly, when I think about this whole thing, what I’m really doing is trying to kick an addiction.
That would explain why I keep slipping back after when I know I need to quit.
Let’s start with the why.
Why do i want to quit social media?
That feels so self explanatory now that I actually am looking at the question.
But alas, let’s answer anyway.
I want to quit social media because I hate it for so many reasons.
I originally started participating in it after high school because I felt like I needed to if I was ever going to be able to sell my books and make that a livable income for me. But that just has not been working at all. To be blunt, I don’t know if I believe writing will ever be able to be my primary income. I still feel like I have to post for my books though (addiction, am I right?). I know it doesn’t help. I know it takes time from things that I actually enjoy doing. But I still feel aggressively compelled to do it for the sake of any chance at a career.
The other reason I am compelled to keep posting is that I wanted to find some community. Dare I say even make friends. This has led to several problems.
- I don’t do well with surface level friendships. I have no family and one friend who lives in a completely different state from me. I honestly need friends less and a surrogate family more and because of that, a lot of the interactions I’ve had with people has felt more like acquaintances and it leaves me craving so much more. So I feel so lonely so much of the time.
- I think I’m over asking on the whole “social” part. I don’t have the issues I have Instagram or Bluesky when I’m posting on Youtube because when I make a youtube video, even a stream. I kind of don’t expect people to respond. (I’m not really expecting many people to watch at all so the idea of getting engagement is a little out there for me.) But with these other apps, especially bluesky, I kind of have this mindset that I’m participating in a conversation. So when I just don’t get people interacting with me, it hits with this “alone in a room full of people” feeling. And Wow, does that hurt.
- Toxic communication styles. I got into two bad tifs with people that held some meaning to me, one moreso than the other, where I felt like I was being gaslit (literally denying and making up things that had and hadn’t been said when the explicit text is right there) and I felt like I was being lashed out at in ways that have left me so extremely anxious to engage with the people that I kind of value on these sites. It also feels like I’m building walls emotionally as I see how people interact with others. And yeah, maybe it’s not a bad idea that I am not ignoring how someone talks to others, but I just feel like I’ve gotten to a point where I honestly want to start a whole new set of accounts to see if I can get dropped in a different corner of the internet but I don’t think another one will be any better.
And the last thing I want to say as a reason that I want to leave social media is the book community.
I won’t get super into it. But there are so many people in the book community that are so determined to insist that if the book isn’t something they want then it shouldn’t exist and I am at the crossroads of a lot of it: I like science in fantasy, as someone that has spent most of my life hyper cognizant of my death the HEA in romance thing really does attack the things that helped me feel like staying alive meant anything (it also touches on so many kinds of bigotry as well, but we don’t have time for that today but I will say forcing people out of the group for your right to comfort does fit real nicely into that “pillars of white supremacy” graphic), I identify as queer so I write w/w, w/m, and w/nb with characters that identify as queer and/or sapphic and I have explictly seen people say that is invalid in many different ways and they won’t read unless you pick a label they think is identity enough.
And when so many directions of the community I so desperately want to be a part of is telling me they don’t want me, telling me they think I’m a problem, and then acting like it’s my fault if them saying those things makes me feel unwelcome. Well, I had the very natural reaction of slipping back into suicidality.
Like scarily.
Story time
I’ve talked about this before, but when I was in middle school I realized that I was suicidal because I had started writing six or so different stories that all involved a self insert character committing or attempting suicide and there just kind of was no other way to explain why.
A few months ago I had been interested in the idea of making comic panels that go to songs I like. The first one I started planning out, all of the panels depicted either self harm or suicide.
And I was genuinely scared.
So if you’ve noticed that my posting has been patchy for a while, that’s why.
So I’m quitting social media… again… kind of.
The longest I ever went without it was when I used an actual addiction tactic: replace the habit with a different one.
For months, every time I felt the urge to open social media, I had to write one sentence in my diary. (I use diarium btw). And not only did that help to curb my need to open the apps, but because I write in my diaries in Spanish, sometimes I would need to pause and translate some stuff, look up some conjugations, the kind and that would help put a little more time between the urge and the act of opening social media that helped me to pull away from it for a while.
I want to do something similar.
I want to avoid even opening a social media app until I’ve made a blog post. (Which is tricky cause as of typing this I can’t even get into my damn blog). (Update: we’re in).
And so far, I’ve been doing pretty good at staying off social media.
There have been some other things that have come up but we can get into those another time.
For now