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I’ve been avoiding Facebook lately.
Not for the reasons many people take a “break” from Facebook – privacy issues, fury at the commercialism, etc etc.
I love Facebook, privacy issues and all.
It’s the positivity I can’t handle right now.
I find Facebook to be a relentlessly positive place.
People who I know are having relationship issues post lovey-dovey facebook statuses at each other. It’s weird when you see a couple bickering bitterly and then the next day read “So happy to wake up next to my husband! I love you honey bear!”
And other people, usually fellow depressives who are in denial, post these relentlessly, shamelessly inspirational images that make me want to smash things.
As Hyperbole and a Half points out, positivity looks really, really, fake when you’re feeling depressed.
And people keep talking about BABIES.
May has brought an explosion of babies. Oddly, one of my best friends just had a baby and I have NO problem with those pictures/updates. I love looking at pictures of her newborn, and it helps that it has mostly been just pictures, not statuses going “OMG HAVING A BABY IS SO THE AWESOME”.
But other people keep having babies too, and people are happy about them. Two of my friends have received new nieces in the last couple of days. Other statuses have enthused about even more remote babies – friend of friend babies, new puppies etc.
And I don’t want to read them.
I don’t know why I have no problem looking at my friend’s newborn babies, but can’t stand to hear about a friend’s friend’s friend’s new baby boy.
Maybe it goes back to the whole silent miscarriage thing. Social taboos keep me from Facebooking about my miscarriage, and so Facebook is a place where everyone pretends everything is all right.
Since I don’t like making fakey status updates when I’m miserable, and I’m not really supposed to Facebook about why I am miserable, I haven’t been posting.
Meanwhile, all the people who do know about my miscarriage are happily posting cheery Facebook updates and it just feels like the entire world is ignoring what just happened to me.
And it’s my fault, really, because I COULD go and Facebook about my miscarriage. I probably even SHOULD.
But that wouldn’t stop the fact that life goes on for other people, and they won’t and SHOULDN’T spend all their time gnashing their teeth and bewailing my unhappy fate.
Nor is it like I need more support.
All the people who I’m even remotely close to, physically or emotionally, already know and are here for me. Posting about my miscarriage now would just feel like needless moping/buzzkilling.
So I’m just not spending much time there, in happy positivity land.
And I don’t mean that I’m moping – PH and I have been laughing a lot actually. We need it – it’s therapeutic. But the stuff that makes us smile is more cynical, more dark – something we are more akin to, right now.
Stuff like A Softer World, which is like instagram for depressives.
Some of it makes me smile:
And some of it actually does inspire me much more than the oppressively cheerful stuff does:
I have also restarted my antidepressants, which is helping.
When I take them I feel more accepting of my loss, more able to look ahead and go back to normal life. My baby died, it sucked, let’s make another.
But it still happened, and I’m not forgetting.
I don’t think I will totally lose all the anger until I am 10 weeks pregnant again and have a baby with a heartbeat.
Or maybe until I hold a new baby in my arms.
