Tag Archive for: Facebook

It’s All Relational

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I deleted Facebook from my phone two weeks ago and my nervous system is thanking me for it. I also decided to only go check the site once a day from my computer, in the morning, to make my way through the notifications, see what my friends and groups are up to, and maybe post a link to something I wrote, before logging off and leaving it for the next day. 

Since my divorce two years ago, I’ve felt lonely. (Actually, I was lonely long before then, but that’s not worth getting in to right now). Increasingly, I used Facebook as a way to connect with other people, to the point where I found myself checking it dozens of times a day. If I posted something and nobody commented or responded, I was frustrated, and conversely, when someone remarked on a post of mine or responded to a comment I left, I was elated. I felt that dopamine surge with glee. 

I will admit to some fear of letting go of Facebook. In the last several years, I’ve secured writing work almost exclusively from groups I belong to, and I am honestly worried that I will miss seeing opportunities if I don’t check the site more than once a day for five minutes. But I’d be lying if I said I feel good about supporting the platform itself and all that it stands for – capitalism, exploitation, curated news feeds, manipulation. 

Today, in a conversation with a friend, I was finally able to articulate what it is that I’m discovering about Facebook and, to be honest, other social media platforms as well. They are transactional, but they masquerade as relational. And my work, my passion, centers on the power of relationship and how transformational it is if we really engage in it with intentionality. 

To be sure, I am able to use social media as a way to  keep up with my cousins who live two states away – seeing photos of their kids and hearing about the things happening in their lives. I am kept informed of important events in the lives of friends who live far away and able to celebrate those things with a group of other friends online. But that’s not relationship. 

When I post something on Facebook, it is the equivalent of me standing on a stage with a bullhorn, proclaiming my opinion or telling folks about some idea I have. While, in general, they are free to comment, I don’t have to choose to engage with them, and often the comments aren’t inviting that kind of exchange – they are simply an acknowledgment. That’s not relationship. That’s a transaction. 

I have created relationship with folks I met online, but the connection was made offline – either in person or via email or FaceTime or, increasingly, Marco Polo. And in relationship, we are able to learn about and from each other, engage in conversations that are deep and also sometimes superficial and goofy. The communication is not performative in any way because there isn’t an audience and I think that’s important. I can talk to people about racism or what it means to struggle with trauma without voyeurs, and in relationship, I can make mistakes. I can say something and have the other person take a step back and let me know that maybe what I said was insensitive or even inappropriate and, without all of the rest of my Facebook friends looking on, I can take that information in and use it to learn. 

I do believe, and have for a long time, that the way we will make this world a better place is through relationship. It is not by “fixing” systems or forcing outcomes, but by engaging in conversations with each other on a very human level where we are allowed to be imperfect, grow, make mistakes, and hold each other accountable. It will take time and a willingness to be present, to pay attention, to suspend judgment, and to show up in our local communities. It involves us taking a leap of faith to connect with other people and let them decide whether or not to invite us in to relationship, or to invite others in to relationship with us. It is the stuff of every day life – seeing someone struggle to carry all of their things and offering to help shoulder the load, volunteering at a neighborhood organization for no other reason than there is a need to be met and we have the resources to help meet it, striking up a conversation with the neighbor while we are both out sweeping the walk. When we strengthen those connections with other people, we begin to see them as part of our community, and when we center those relationships in our lives in a way that feels foundational, it is harder to see other people as stepping stones to our own personal success. 

The post I wrote in April about systems centering themselves is part of this idea. When we center relationship, there is no way we can choose to disadvantage individual people in order to serve the “greater good.” Because the greater good relies on all of us being ok, and we are not ok. There are too many of us who don’t have shelter, or enough to eat. There are too many of us who are not safe, either in our own homes or out on the streets. And when we can create communities of care that are rooted in relationships, real, authentic, dynamic relationships where people have affection for each other, support one another physically and spiritually and emotionally, and see each other as vital to our own well-being, we will be on our way to inviting new systems to be born – systems that are grounded in the mutual exchange of ideas and love rather than transactions that serve some but not all. 

I Just ‘Unliked’ Your Facebook Page

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My (online) world is shrinking. I am doing my best to be open-minded and deliberate about it because I don’t want to turn into some old curmudgeon who only listens to and reads things that reflect my point of view.  That said, I’m tired. I’m sick of seeing things on my Facebook feed that are designed to create controversy in order to drive ‘clicks.’ If I never see one more link to an article about “anti-vaxxers” or “mommy wars” about breastfeeding vs. bottle feeding, I might live a little longer. All of these blog posts and articles that would have us believe that important, complicated issues are black and white and we need to PICK A SIDE, ALREADY make me tired.

I occasionally forget what is good for me and enter into the fray, generally to point out that there are few issues that are truly black and white and degenerating into (or starting out with) name-calling doesn’t move the conversation along at all. And then I get called a “libtard” and my motives and intelligence get called into question and I get a stomach ache and have to take the dog for a long walk to remind myself not to do that again.

Lately, my recourse has been to take note of those organizations who repeatedly highlight contentious issues and pretend that they are doing so to “create conversation” and ‘unlike’ them on Facebook.  I simply am not willing to support groups who are only interested in causing mayhem in the pursuit of clicks and, thus, advertising dollars, even if I agree with much of the rest of their content.  (ThinkProgress, I’m talking about you.) While this is nothing new in the world of social media, it either seems as though it has kicked into high gear of late, or I have finally hit my tipping point.  I am so much more interested in thoughtful, respectful, educated exchanges with people who are genuinely willing to listen to others and perhaps take a mental walk in someone else’s shoes. Call it compassion. Call it open-mindedness. Call it what you want, but I’m building some boundaries around my world to keep out the folks who are more driven by being Right than they are by being Human.

I’m Not Rescuing My Kids, I’m Teaching Them That They Can Rely On Others

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According to some, I “rescued” my 14-year old today and I shouldn’t have.  Ironically, one of the first things I saw on my Facebook feed this morning was an essay in Brain, Child that spoke to this exact issue and would probably have placed me squarely in the camp of “helicopter parent.”

I beg to differ.

As a child, I was fully indoctrinated into the world of toughlove. The world of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and “learn to succeed on your own.” And, largely, I benefited from those lessons – the teachers who let me puzzle through challenging lessons without giving me answers, my dad refusing to bail me out when I got myself into debt because I didn’t think ahead, other adults in my life who showed me they believed in my abilities by not stepping in to forewarn me of some misstep I was about to take.  But there were times when I would have done much better knowing that I had support, times when I believed that independence was tantamount to connection and that being able to take care of myself was more important than asking for help. It would have served me very well to know how to even gauge my own thresholds, to know how to assess when I was out of my depth and needed a lifeline. Instead, the message I internalized was that I needed to be fully self-sufficient.

One morning a few months ago, I stepped in to the quiet halls of the school my daughters attend.  The students were all in classrooms, the sunlight streaming through the windows and bouncing off the shiny locker doors. The receptionist sat at his computer typing away with the dean of staff hovering behind his shoulder. They both looked up in surprise as I tugged on the front door, needing to be buzzed in.

“Lola left this on the printer this morning,” I waved a sheet of paper in the air in explanation. The dean rolled her eyes and shook her head at me.  She would have preferred that I let Lola twist in the wind, that she learn a difficult lesson about remembering her own homework.  I felt a wave of shame and defensiveness begin to rise up in my belly but I blocked the words before they sputtered out of my mouth. I turned to the receptionist, kindly asked him to hand the paper to Lola at the next break between classes, thanked them both, and left.

Since that day, I have shown up at the school maybe once or twice to drop off basketball shoes or a hastily-prepared lunch for one of my girls. I will defend those decisions unequivocally and here is why.

As an adult, I cannot claim that I never forget anything at home that I ought to have had with me, despite the toughlove lessons I received as a child.  As an adult, I have the ability to return home in my car to get the things I forgot or use my debit card to purchase my lunch on the fly.  My children do not have that option available to them.  On more than one occasion, Bubba has called me from a business trip to plead that I stop by the dry cleaners to pick up his suit because he totally forgot to do it before he left and he will need it as soon as he returns home. Should I refuse him this kindness in an effort to “teach him a lesson?” I think not. And I won’t do that to my children, either.  I refuse to let Lola go hungry at lunch in order to impart some false sense of wisdom.  Instead, I will offer them the same courtesy I hope my loved ones would extend to me in my time of need.

There are obvious exceptions, and if there is a pattern of behavior that I think needs to be dealt with, I will of course address that in a different way, but it makes me crazy to envision a world in which my daughters are taught that they are the only ones responsible for every detail of their lives.  If that were true, we would all live in a house where we only did our own dishes and nobody else’s and we wouldn’t be able to count on each other to remind us of important events when our brains (and calendars) are overloaded.

Some of the examples of enabling the author called out in her essay felt to me as though they were oversimplified in the making of her point.  There is a difference between ‘rescuing’ our children and teaching them life lessons that will serve them well one day.  I long ago stopped doing all of my girls’ laundry for them, but if Eve has hours of homework to do and her basketball uniform needs a 12-hour turnaround, I’ll offer to help out if I have time. I don’t pay the girls’ library fines if their books are overdue, but when I realized that it was getting to be a problem, I offered to help them brainstorm ways to make it easier to find and return books they had checked out.  Instead of letting them believe that there are only two solutions (Mom does it or I do it), I hope I can teach them that we are all in this together and that makes it a better world for everyone.  Yes, they are ultimately responsible for their own stuff and their choices and behaviors, but there are times where you just mess up and other times when you can’t solve the problem all alone.  I know that the only thing stopping Eve from zipping home to get her own running shoes and socks today at lunchtime was the fact that she isn’t old enough to drive. Given that we live five minutes from school, I have absolutely no problem heading down there to drop them off because I think the lesson here is that I’m willing to help her out when I can. I would rather raise my kids to be compassionate team-players than super-responsible, hyper-independent individuals who refuse to help someone find their misplaced keys because “it isn’t my problem.” I would rather raise them to know that it’s okay to be human and ask other people for help occasionally, that getting assistance doesn’t lead to dependence and lethargy and laziness.  Most of my early adult life was spent pushing people away, feigning that I was capable of handling anything that presented itself. While I felt a great deal of pride in my accomplishments, I was also scared of the next thing that might come along that I might NOT be able to deal with and I was pretty damn lonely.  It feels a lot better to know that someone has my back and if my kids learn that I’m there for them when they can’t do for themselves, I will be able to sleep soundly at night, whether or not you label me a “helicopter mom.”

When it’s a Waste of Time (and Energy) to Comment

I have been on a bit of an activist rampage lately in my own head.  Last week, Eve’s social studies teacher assigned them the 14-page “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” written by Martin Luther King, Jr. and she encouraged parents to read it as well so they could discuss it with their children.  Despite the fact that I figured the chances of Eve wanting to hang out and have a philosophical discussion with me about her homework were about 1/infinity, I printed out all 14 pages and sat down with a highlighter.

By the time I was done reading, I had three pages of notes and I felt like the top of my head was afire.  I could nearly hear the synapses in my brain shooting across from one cell to the next, making connections between what King was writing about and so many other unjust laws that exist today.  Regardless of Eve’s decision to talk with me about it or not, I vowed to put my thoughts into a coherent essay soon and try to submit it for publication somewhere.

Fresh from the revelations of this amazing piece of writing by MLK, Jr. I went to the premiere of the documentary Girl Rising with a friend.  Eve and Lola are going to see it next week with their classmates and I was curious to see whether it would prove relevant to them.  I was impressed.  The film tells the stories of nine girls around the world who face incredible difficulties accessing education but persevere and manage to find a way to make it happen.  Woven between the narratives of their lives are astonishing statistics about the way education impacts the lives of women and girls (and thus, the entire human race and perhaps the planet) and I walked out of that theater on fire again, wanting to find a way to keep the momentum of this amazing story going.

This morning after dropping the girls at school, I sat and meditated the best I could with all the noise inside my own brain, forced myself to take the dog on a long walk to compose a writing plan for the day, and finally sat down to start working.

The first thing I did was check my Facebook feed which is, unsurprisingly, filled with information from organizations like Everyday Feminism, The International Planned Parenthood Foundation, A Mighty Girl, etc.  Miss Representation had a link to an article in Time Magazine where Sheryl Sandberg was defending Melissa Mayer’s new maternity leave policies and the discontinuation of telecommuting at Yahoo.  The quote they shared was this,

“The more women stick up for one another, the better. Sadly this doesn’t always happen. And it seems to happen even less when women voice a position that involves a gender related issue. The attacks on Marissa for her maternity leave plans came almost entirely from other women. This has certainly been my experience too. Everyone loves a fight–and they really love a cat fight.” Sheryl Sandberg

I clicked through the link to the story, read it, and went back to read the comments on the Facebook page.  After the third comment, I realized I could feel subtle changes in my body – quickening pulse, tightening muscles in my shoulders and hands, shallower breaths – and I moved my hands to the keyboard of my laptop in preparation for response.

And then I sat back.  I took a deep breath and wondered how it would feel to simply be an observer in this case.  I wondered what would happen if I made a conscious choice not to add my comments to a dialogue with people I didn’t know.  Having commented on issues similar to this in this way before, I know that what I end up with is unsatisfying.  Rarely does anyone respond directly to my opinion (and if they do, I only know because I take the time to go back and check the FB page every once in a while), and I have no way of knowing how many people have actually read my comment.  I know that when I see a polarizing conversation on Facebook that has hundreds (or even dozens) of comments, I tend to skim through a few and then get bored unless the commenters are people I know personally.  I have already made up my mind on most of the issues and it does me no good to read what everyone else thinks, especially if it is only inflaming my need to respond.

This one time I experimented with reading each and every comment, noting the opinions of the responders and taking a moment to think about them all.  Without the intent to add my own two cents.  It was strangely freeing.  It was a much-needed reminder that I don’t have to react to every conversation that occurs around me, even if it is within the context of something that I truly care about.  My voice was not likely to make a damn bit of difference and to get sucked in to that issue would only have taken time away from other things I find more compelling and important.  It is so easy to think that just because I can comment easily, I ought to, that this is somehow a test of wills and adding my voice might tip the balance.  When I sat back and thought about what it would look like for me to type up a comment and hit enter, it felt more like throwing a pebble into a black hole than adding a brick to a much-needed wall.  I wonder how much time I have devoted to engaging in social media wars of words that are ultimately inconsequential. I suspect a lot.  Perhaps I can turn my attention to communities with whom I can have actual conversations that exchange ideas and may lead to something real as opposed to driving traffic to a particular site or filling some web advertiser’s pocket.