Human brain, no matter how awful a decision maker it is, always manages to find a way to entertain itself. Social media is one such place which makes you feel entertained and connected to the world that is full of people like you. People who are also trying to fix their self-worth and finding a way to belong in a world that they had no access to 20 years ago.
Until a year back, I was this person who was struggling with low self-worth and had found an escape in social media. It felt like an alarm clock that would buzz every few minutes (and sometimes even seconds) to remind me that I have a virtual existence on the internet too. And every time I felt that nothing new was popping up on my feed, I would give the alarm clock a reason to buzz more frequently by posting a meme or an irrelevant update that no one cared about. All that to collect some fakes likes and views.
One day, I found myself sitting on the bed scrolling my phone purposelessly. It was the time when I had just completed my post-graduation and was waiting for my job offer letter to arrive. Back then, I was also going through bouts of anxiety because I’ve always been that one kid who would keep worrying about the future. Suddenly, Mom came over to my room and asked me to declutter my shelf and keep aside the stuff that could be donated or thrown away. Still scrolling through the screen, I assured her it would be done in an hour.
After what appeared to be a few minutes, I decided to keep the phone aside and jumped out of the bed to clean the shelf. I scooped the entire stuff out of the shelf with a plan to sort through it and keep all the important stuff back in an organized way. While going through my paper drawer, I noticed that the clock had just struck 4. I turned towards Mom and asked her if she remembers the time on the clock when she came into my room to instruct me to declutter. She answered that it was somewhere around 12:30 pm.
I got back to work but a sudden feeling of guilt set in. Three and a half hours, and all I did was run my fingers up and down a screen. Three and a half hours! But why was I feeling guilty? After all, those weren’t the first ‘three and a half hours’ of my life spent like that. And like those umpteen number of times in the past, this time too, the wave of guilt should pass away. But I was wrong. This time, it was different. The guilt soon turned into severe anxiety and I started feeling terrible. I spent the next few hours thinking what else could I have done during those ‘n’ number of hours that I otherwise chose to spend on Facebook and Instagram. I consoled myself again, “Maybe you’ll wake up tomorrow and it will all be gone. The guilt and the anxiety.” The consolation worked fine, and I felt better. Contented, I hopped back on my phone to scroll more only to realize that my anxiety was slowly getting worse. The more I scrolled, the more anxious I felt. But I kept scrolling until I was tired of feeling anxious and stressed out. I knew I wasn’t fine. I wanted to cry. I secretly did.
Next morning was no different.
“Tomorrow will be better”, I told myself.
The next two weeks largely went into deactivating and reactivating the Facebook account, and in the meantime, I lost half my appetite due to anxiety. My family knew I wasn’t in the pink of health. Buried in my phone for like half a day, only I knew how I was hiding myself from the reality. Thinking about the kind of life I had been living since the arrival of social media made me feel like an addict. And yet, I wasn’t ready to give up on that ‘piece of shit’ in my hand.
One fine day, Mom finally confronted me and asked blatantly, “What’s the problem? Just tell me, what’s the problem?” I still ponder over how I put that fake smile up on my face and assured her that I was fine and the loss in appetite was possibly because of the ‘change in weather’.
Trust me, folks! Your Mom knows everything, even if you believe otherwise. They’re called ‘Mothers’ for a reason.
So Mom kept looking at me until I decided to shed away the fake smile. I finally told her about the anxiety and how it would make me want to cry all the time. She sat with me the whole day trying to comfort me. Had I known that merely speaking about the problem would have eased it off, I would have done that long ago. After two nightmarish weeks, I finally went to bed feeling hopeful. To say that I was happy would be an understatement. It was rather this newly found hope that motivated me to finally take the plunge. I jumped off my bed and walked straight to the living room.
“Just do it before you change your mind.”, I told myself.
Within the next few minutes, I unfriended everyone off my facebook and Instagram accounts, exited each and every group on whatsapp and finally pressed the ‘Delete My Account’ button on every single one of my social media accounts. I slept peacefully that night, but what came after looked like a huge transition that wasn’t as easy to get through.
The next morning felt like a huge shift to an undiscovered world when I unlocked my phone and found no social media apps on my phone. The moment of truth had arrived, and the next two days were hard to pass through. I’d be lying if I say that life didn’t feel empty. It seemed like the world has spewed me out to live on my own. After hours of watching TV, listening music, studying, reading newspaper, I would look up at the clock only to realize that there was still time to be killed. But it was better than the guilt and the regret of scrolling. Within a couple of days, I came to terms with the newness that I had chosen for myself.
It has now been a year and though I have joined whatsapp again because of work-related reasons, facebook and instagram still stand deleted. Life has certainly changed for good as I now find myself looking for something new every time it feels boring. The hours that I would otherwise spend wandering what others might be uploading on internet are now being spent thinking “what shall I do to make the day interesting?” I cook, I talk, I sing, I write, I think.
There seems to be a little world of my own which doesn’t make me feel ‘Available’ all the time. I feel more present than I have ever felt in my life. I now spend my time talking to people who really matter and care about me. I realize that these are the people who bother calling me up because they care and not because they just saw my picture on the gram and thought it would be good to call. I now give my time to ‘real’ people who I know will always be around when I need them and people who I call my family. I look them in the eye (and not in the phone) and I feel loved. My self-worth issues have vanished once and for all. I now get few birthday wishes than I did previously because there’s no social media in my life than could remind people of my existence. But at least these are genuine wishes. Of course, I too have learned to remember birthdays and anniversaries.
Now I may join social media back at some point in future, but I’d know when it’s time to kick them out of my life. And this time, I will have the confidence and power to do it in a blink.
The anxiety is long gone. The bright blue wall of facebook is a distant memory now. To say that I’m not worried about anything would be a lie but at every step, I experience a change. There’s no urge and means to bother my virtual friends with what I’m eating, where I’m walking, how good I looked in the party I attended last night, what my beliefs are and what I feel about the movie I watched recently. Because honestly, no one really cares. I now watch kid cartoons or a nice movie on Netflix when I feel bored because that cheers me up.
Life doesn’t feel invaded by some unrealistically happy world and I feel mature enough to understand that happiness and grief are a part of life and no facebook or Instagram or twitter can take it away.
Because Life is exactly what was happening around me while I was busy looking for it in my phone.
