Thalia Huntley

Hashtag shitpost. Cancel culture. Doxxing. All lives matter. Trolling. “I hate that. I hate, I hate, I hate.”

I decided on the tenth of this month to take a break from social media, and here’s what happened. I started by removing the temptation altogether. I uninstalled all my social media apps, even Pinterest. Pinterest! At first, I experienced the “FOMO effect.” FOMO=Fear Of Missing Out. I was stressed just doing that!

But after a couple of hours, it started to sink in. I didn’t have any social media on my phone. I wasn’t staring at my phone, feeling my breathing go shallow from stress, watching people I don’t even know condemn me for the carefully curated thoughts I worked so hard to make out like they were unstudied and insightful. I wasn’t checking for updates constantly, waiting eagerly to be judged for my taste in memes. I didn’t feel I had to answer for myself every time I touched the word “post.” And you know what I did after that?

I relaxed.

I literally took away the thing that was making me so miserable I felt like I couldn’t breathe right, and I felt better. Who could have imagined that removing the thing that stresses you can make you less stressed? Not to say it was my only stressor. This is still 2020.

I got home that afternoon and I broke out–that’s right–my coloring pencils and a coloring book. My favorite ones are by Selina Fenech, and I get them from Amazon. I spent more than an hour not looking at my phone screen, almost two. I actually watched, with my eyeballs, a couple of episodes of Private Practice, rather than having it on while I stared at my phone. It occurred to me about ten minutes in that I had forgotten what the actors’ faces looked like. I had a face to face conversation with my husband. In one afternoon, I had dropped the obsession with social media that was making me miserable. My husband and I took a little overnight trip to Chattanooga and spent the day walking around, looking at Broad Street and the aquarium, even going to see the Big Lebowski at the Tivoli theatre. We ate delicious food, enjoyed the beautiful weather, and didn’t look at our phones except to send texts to family. It was wonderful!

Why was this such a big deal for me? How had Twitter and Facebook and Instagram become the central focus of my life? How had I started to revolve all my attention around what other people thought of me?

I planned and had my wedding last year. Social media helped me reach out to people whose numbers I didn’t have so that I could invite them. I even got to plan lunches with some of the ones I hadn’t seen in a long time because we didn’t work together anymore. I get to keep up with my cousins and aunts and uncles in other states, which, given how expensive travel can be and the current restrictions due to Covid-19, is pretty awesome. I’m not saying social media is bad. That’s like people who say that money is bad. Money is money. It’s an exchange of energy, goods for services. It’s not inherently bad. Neither is social media. As with everything in this world, it is what we humans make of it.

So here’s the hard thing about being a grown up: filtering out the hate. When you have a platform that not only encourages but practically demands free speech from its participants, regardless of their education, background, or anything else resembling some type of qualification, really, you wind up with what I like to call “word salad.” People just start spewing whatever comes into their minds, which winds up tossed like a salad into the internet.

There’s trolling, which is supposed to be just like pranking, only trolling is essentially making hateful comments for the sheer purpose of getting people to get mad at you for being so rude. Attention-seeking, much? So…making hate to spawn more hate. Let’s keep the hate coming around! More hate over here!

Then there’s the really frustrating aspect of existing in a text-based, one-liner world: misinterpretations. Tone doesn’t carry well over text, particularly when you are limited by the number of characters to get your point across. On the one hand, it forces writers to be more concise in their wording, work harder to find the right phrasing in order to be understood well. On the other hand, even if you have the length of a novel to make your point, someone will ALWAYS misunderstand you. And people on the internet LOVE to take offense. If someone says they feel bad about how many times they’ve read Harry Potter, I might say something with the intention of being supportive and funny, but it comes across to the person as condescending and competitive. Suddenly I’m the bad guy when I was trying to be helpful. If I try to share a funny old story but have to cut the characters down, someone inevitably leaps on the lack of embellishment and says it’s a boring story, or calls it a “hashtag shitpost.” I should have listened to my mother when she told me not to talk to strangers.

The news is full of hate. Full to overflowing with Johnny Depp getting fired because he’s abusive, and total strangers are lining up to say how much they hate him, how he deserved to be fired, etc. I’m not weighing in, I’m merely pointing out how people can’t stand an abuser and how he deserved to lose his job but are just as quick to condemn his ex-wife for not knowing what she was getting herself into in the first place. And JK Rowling is purported to hate Trans people. Well guess what? The Transgendered, and most of their allies, are hating her right back. Our soon-to-be-former president hates everyone who isn’t him, and the people he hates hate him back. That right there is A LOT of hate, and I’m pretty sure it spans the globe. There’s the people who hate the President Elect and his running mate, there’s the people who hate LGBTQ+ people, the people who hate POCs, and then there’s the LGBTQ+ and POCs who hate their haters. There’s hate everywhere, and when it’s on your personal news feed, it starts to feel like those people all hate you.

Is it any wonder I needed a break? Would you believe, when I came back after a solid week without checking one single notification, I saw that people had responded to my announcement that I was taking a break with, you guessed it, insults! Does everyone with a Twitter handle think they’re Bianca del Rio at a show?

Why did I start a Twitter in the first place? To grow my audience as a writer, build a following, make myself more attractive to agents and publishers. But here’s the thing. People got published and had best sellers looooong before social media, and if it means I get to keep a little shred of my sanity and have the time to focus on actually being a writer, why wouldn’t I get rid of it? It’s a distraction, it’s full of negativity, it makes me feel bad about myself, and it takes waaaaay more time away from my writing than I would ever want to admit. And the whole point was to push my writing, right? Not to mention I never grew a damn thing on that site, and I definitely haven’t grown as a writer. Kinda defeats the purpose if I’m spending more time being distracted than actually writing, right?

So guess what? I DELETED MY TWITTER! And I don’t miss it even a little bit. Look at me, right here, writing again! I’ve even got a new project underway. I can’t wait to spend more time doing what I’ve always loved, and here’s to me NOT finding any new ways to be distracted!

Finally, I want to leave you beautiful readers with some love. I love all of you, few and proud though you may be. And I can’t wait to share news of my writing, and hopefully other good news as it comes my way, with you. Love, people. Love each other, love yourselves, love your work. Just love.