I keep telling myself that social media is not the place for me, that there’s not enough people listening and too many people talking, that they are not and never really have been my friends, that I’m going to give up screaming in a room full of other people screaming… and yet, in the file pictured above, sit a bunch of blog post ideas (some almost completely written) for here, for the book blog, for the editing website… and I do nothing, but continue trying to be heard over everyone else who is trying to be heard.
The weird thing is that I really don’t care if people hear me, no matter how much I want to be heard.
Wait. Let me rephrase that. I, like lots of other people, WANT to be heard, but I don’t want to be heard by EVERYBODY. Instead, I just want to be heard by my people, people who may be thinking or feeling the same way that I am thinking or feeling. People who are going through the same things and need to know that they are not alone, as I need to know that I am not alone.
In my quest to be heard, by people who need to hear me and people I need to hear, I allow fear (of not being heard, of being judged, of being misunderstood, of being ignored) to make me continue doing the same things over and over again. Daily I go to Facebook in hopes that someone will listen to the words that I have so eloquently written, words that I hope will strike up a conversation, but instead, there is nothing. Crickets. A few likes, maybe, but never the conversation I hope for.
I take this as judgment, and I use that judgment against myself. Was I wrong in what I was feeling? Did the words I use not make sense to people who do not know the full story inside my head? Could I have communicated with more detail and less flowery prose? Am I the only one who feels this way or thinks this way?
And that’s when loneliness sets in. Because really, my strive to be heard is really just a mission to find people who I can relate to, who can relate to me.
I’m not going to find that on social media, and honestly, I feel like I’m backtracking into the days before the internet was something we used every day all day. I miss the “old days” when people wrote letters and talked to each other on the phone. When friendships were real and right in front of you.
I have removed the social media apps from my phone to try and cure myself of this disease, this need to be noticed by people who wouldn’t notice me if we were standing in the same room in real life, and instead, vow to make friends that are true, friendships that are meaningful.
And to write here more. Where I can be heard by my tribe. Rather than try to make people my tribe that aren’t deserving of the place.
Beautiful Screamer 