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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.
If By Yes 
“People who I know are having relationship issues post lovey-dovey facebook statuses at each other.”
That annoys me even on a good day.
Glad I’m not alone on that!
Totally not allone in that!
Not in the least!
I believe it’s called “fakebooking”. People (mostly) don’t like to share their sadness or frustration or general blah because… people gossip. And judge. And who needs that, eh? It’s one of the big reasons I’ve had to take FB cleanses – it gets too happy/fake. 😦
I hope you & yours are doing ok. *hugs*
Fakebooking – that’s awesome!
Add me to the list of those who can’t stand the ooey gooey statuses. Even before the miscarriage I got annoyed at all the “X days old already. Growing up so fast. Mamma loves you, little peachy poo” stuff. I love my child more than anything but I don’t feel the need to post on FB about it. I’ll give him kisses instead.
Ugh, yes. I like status about funny things kids and babies do and say. I like hearing about the domestic disasters they sometimes cause. But they meaningless gushing is annoying as heck!
There’s a saying that goes: “Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so”. (Sorry, can’t remember who said it first). Bottom line – each crisis has a blessing hidden inside it and each blessing has a crisis hidden inside IT! Am I making sense?
Another saying which resonates with me is that we shouldn’t compare our “behind the scenes” (life) with someone else’s “show reel”!
I’m guilty of posting a lot of “motivational” stuff on my wall, not because I’m “all that” but because it’s what I’m struggling with, reminders to myself, things to work towards, things I wish or hope for etc. I also re-post things which I find funny and / or which resonate with me on some level.
My kids are 20 and 17 years old respectively. My son in particular isn’t one who finds it easy to express his emotions physically or face to face, so yes, I do post on FB or Skype him that I love him and I’m proud of him because he NEEDS to KNOW this in a way that’s most comfortable for him!
I refuse to apologise for “bragging” (in a sense) by posting about how much I love my hubby & kids and how proud I am to be their mom, because it’s true! However I also post about my Fibromyalgia and Depression and all that “dark stuff” too -because both the light and dark are equally a part of my life … just like they’re a part of EVERYBODY’S life!!
I’m not saying the stuff people post is wrong. I just can’t handle it right now. It’s my problem, not theirs.
Many depressives do not find positive stuff helpful because the negative voices in their head negative it. My cognitive behaviour therapy class taught us that affirmations and stuff often do not help for that reason. If it works for you, great, but it doesn’t for most people. Instead, realistic thoughts work better
For example, thinking “my baby died but the sunrise is beautiful!” Is proven not to be helpful to most people. But thinking “my baby died but miscarriage happens and I will likely have another baby some day” is helpful.
So I try to focus on the realistic thoughts and the positivity stuff just doesn’t fit my mindset right now.
Facebook is a funny place, huh? You get people who only post funny shit, ten of them in a row, three times a day. Then you get the “my kid is the BEST ever!” people who post every.single.thing their special snowflake does. Then you have your political people who only seem to post stuff putting down or lifting up the party they love or hate. Then there are the “newsies” who only seem to share news stories, however interesting or dull they might be. My aunt is more of a Twitter type poster, who likes to update what she’s doing multiple times a day, even if it’s boring as all heck. She also posts about every freaking lost dog in Nova Scotia, which annoys me because a) I don’t live there and can’t help, and b) they aren’t hide-able, like many other things can be. My sister is her own type: only seems to post shared things that might win her something or “check-ins” when she’s on vacation or out to eat. My foster sister is one of those perky positive types that only seems to post about her awesome boot camp workouts, “The Secret” type motivational crap, and generic “LOVE my life!!!!” type statuses, all the while I know she’s suffering behind the scenes. I think of all of these, the last type is what annoys me the most, too.
Personally, I try to be as real as possible on Facebook, meaning there is a good mix of everything. Stuff I find funny or interesting, newsworthy articles, cute or crazy things my kids did, or annoying stuff that has happened to me. I actually try hard not to have it be TOO negative, as I’m more likely to post when I need to vent or complain. 😛 So I actively try to mix in some positive stuff and lift it all up a bit.
I get the need to take a break, though. Take all the time you need. But, just so you know, I’d have no problem whatsoever with some statuses along the lines of “Having a rough day. Time for ice cream.” or whatever. Even “Miscarriages suck.” I like it real. Anyone who is bothered should mind thier own business and skip your post. Just my perosnal opinion.
Thinking of you…
Ha, you’re totally right about the “types”. The motivational ones and the twitter types bother me the most right now!
Every post you write I find myself nodding along –everything you describe is so similar to my experiences from several months ago. One of my friends gave birth only a couple weeks after I miscarried, but her Facebook posts and pictures never bothered me. Other people ended up getting blocked from my newsfeed because I couldn’t take it. Even though I’m in a much better place now, I’ve been cutting back a lot on facebook lately, and for the most part I don’t miss it that much.
Also, I just really want to thank you for writing these posts, because reading them is helping me process the experience of my miscarriage in ways that I didn’t know I needed to. I had told very few people about it at the time, and in retrospect that may not have been the way to go.
I am so sad to know you have been through all this to, but it is nice to know we’re not alone and I am glad that sharing my experiences has led to us finding that out!
Yeah, I feel you if it’s for different reasons. I avoided FB on Mother’s Day. And it feels like everyone is always talking about their awesome spouse and being all lovey-dovey and having anniversaries and crap. Or if they complain it is because OMG I have to put the kids to bed by myself tonight and I just want to smack them. Meanwhile I am separated and have a spouse who doesn’t want to SEE me.
On the plus side, I have decided to quit being positive on FB and let myself be negative when I want and who the hell cares because the relentless positivity and bragginess is just crazy-making.
But yeah, being on social media when you feel bad is hard. Really hard.
Hurray for negativity! I rarely mind ranty facebook status, as long as they aren’t weird passive aggressive ones that refer to unnamed events so that you can’t contribute anything useful, like “well that was terrible – some of you know what I am talking about”
Fakeness on Facebook may be correlated with number of friends. The more friends one has, the more likely it is most of them are actually rather distant connections and one feels the need to keep up appearances. But that raises the question why it’s somehow felt to be discreditable to be unhappy and unacceptable to share it except with those one’s very close to…
I must admit, the Facebook friend who most annoys me is relentlessly positive. She also uses far too many exclamation marks, and multiple exclamation marks in combination with multiple question marks, and other gross abuses of punctuation. And she’s on TV. It’s a pity, because back in the day when I actually used to see her I liked her very much.
Thinking of you x
I think Facebook personas can be very different from real life personas. And those relentlessly positive ones are definitely among the more annoying personas.
I am so with you on this whole Fakebook thing. It irritates me more than anything these days. I actually did announce my missed miscarriage on Facebook. At first there was an outpouring of support. But now it’s dried up. People are quick to forget. They move on with their lives and forget to ask me how I am. Wish I’d never outed myself sometimes!
Good for you for announcing it! Trust me, it’s better. Far worse than the “how are you?”s are the offhand comments from people who missed the memo at work. “din’t lift that heavy dog, you’re preggers!” and then there’s the whole “uh, no I’m not” explanation.
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You have completely hit the nail on the head about Fakebook.
I also toyed with the idea of announcing my missed miscarriage on facebook with a scan pic of my poor baby but for some reason I didn’t. Wish I had x
Good to know I am not the only one who’s so fed up with positive thinking, and being optimistic… you have every reason to be sad, and when you feel like that this, all these “inspiring quotes” (that are so banal anyway) come accross as fake. I am a part of a group about happiness and whatever we say there should be positive and inspiring and uplifting…it makes me puke at times- and they say FB is so full of negative comments! I just can’t support the “think-optimistic-culture” we have right now… I once said that something is not all roses and was criticized for being too negative! I also wrote a what-not-to-say kind of post, and the same happened! Sometimes, we need to feel bad. It’s like pain, it tells you that something’s wrong. Thinking it away with positive messages and sunshine doesn’t work. As for you, you have every reason to be sad. Something wrong happened, and the fact that you’re not supposed to talk about it makes it worse. Good that you’re using your blog as a platfrom to speak out, thank you!
Yes! You know what they told my in my Cognitive Behavior Therapy course, too? Positivity doesn’t work. They said depressives often try to counteract their negative thoughts with positive thoughts, but it rarely works because they find the negative thoughts more believable. Instead of positive mantras that we don’t even really believe, they encouraged us to think REALISTIC thoughts. For example, when we think “I hate my job” we should instead try to change it to “I hate certain aspects of my job, but there are parts of it that I don’t mind/do well”. When we think “my friends don’t care about me” we change it to “my friends occasionally make me feel left out, but they have done many other things to show that they do care about me.” I can handle realistic thoughts like those. Positivity just makes me cynical and more negative than ever.