Social media is a big part of all of our lives. For me personally, it’s a massive part of my job, of being an independent artist, of getting my music out into the world. It’s a big part of sharing these blog posts with people. And it’s a big part of keeping up with the lives of my family and friends. There’s some really good stuff there. But I also find it really hard; it causes me a lot of anxiety and when I’m in a fragile state of mind, it can contribute to my depression. And since this is the place where I talk about those things, I thought I’d write something about social media and some of the reasons I struggle with it. Maybe you guys will relate.
I’m pretty good at curating a mentally and emotionally safe social media bubble. It still allows healthy debate and differing views, of course, but I’m just really careful about where those views are coming from, i.e. not people who continuously rant and rage but people who share carefully considered thoughts and discuss them with equally considerate people. It’s obviously not that straightforward – it never is with social media – but it is possible to block out a lot of the negativity, the people who are being negative just to be negative. But even then, there are always posts that pop up out of nowhere and knock your feet out from under you.
It was a strange experience, researching for this blog post. While I’m usually writing about my own experiences on this blog (in this case with social media), I often read other blogs and articles to get a broader perspective, get more context, and making sure I’m not missing anything that would be important to include. During my reading for this post, something that came up a lot was the issue of presenting a persona online that isn’t quite the same as your own and to me, that was a surprise. I’ve honestly never felt the pressure to present as anything other than myself – although, I admit, snippets of myself rather than the whole experience (no one needs to know about this boring day or that book I never finished reading). I’ve always seen social media as a reflection of myself, the good and the bad. Maybe that’s an Autism thing – linked in with the commonly occurring need for and sense of honesty. So I can’t really speak to that; I’ll leave that to someone who has more experience with it (I wanted to add a link but I haven’t found one that I think is actually helpful beyond explaining the problem – I’ll add one as soon as I find one that offers something more helpful).
I don’t know what the answers are. But just because we don’t know what the solutions are, it doesn’t mean we stop talking about the problems. That is, afterall, how we eventually come up with the solutions. I need to use social media in order to work and I’m aware that I do get some real good out of it but the downsides can be really hard to handle. So, yeah, I don’t really know what to do. But writing out my thoughts has always helped me and maybe some of you out there will relate to this. Maybe you’ll have some thoughts about it; maybe you’ll just feel a little less alone. I hope so.
Category: about me, anxiety, autism, chronic fatigue syndrome, depression, mental health, music Tagged: anxiety, branding, depression, instagram, marketing, mental health, mental illness, social media, social media bubble, thinking out loud, trigger, triggers, twitter