Close the facebook

On Ash Wednesday I took a break from Facebook for the season of Lent. My normal routine is to get out of bed, check facebook, wash my hair, make breakfast, browse facebook while I eat breakfast, get dressed, and leave for work. This Wed morning I felt lost, had too much time and noticed how quiet the house felt. The first thing that broke the quiet was the sound of our neighbour yelling at her kids outside. She started yelling while I was outside starting our car (at which point I wondered why she wasn't more embarrassed to be yelling at her kids in the company of a stranger) and she continued to yell while I finished drying my hair. You'd think that I'd feel more pious because I'd just made a huge sacrifice for Lent, but all I could do was run through a scenario in my head where I called Social Services and they came and saved the kids from humiliation and severe self-esteem issues. All the while, I was wishing that I could go on facebook and post my thoughts for all my friends to see. Our neighbour yells at her kids a lot (her husband is around somewhere but I don't see him a lot and when I do see him, he is docile and useless.) When I tell people about the yelling, they sometimes respond by saying that having kids is difficult and you find yourself yelling when you don't mean to, or maybe that I just happen to see our neighbour on the few occasions where she's yelling at her kids. No, I've never heard a kind word from her. No, accidental yelling does not include berating your kid and using the F-word. I don't understand why some people choose to have children if they have no intention of making any effort to deal with their frustration over being parents. When you hear someone yelling like that, you can't help but think that they feel like their kids have been forced on them as an unwanted burden. I have no patience for parents who treat their kids in such a terrible way. I feel frustrated and helpless when I see kids that have to grow up being treated so terribly (let me be clear that I am referring to extreme cases of anger/yelling/language.) I don't understand why there's nothing that I can do if they're not being physically or sexually abused or neglected. The kid next door, and probably his little sister too, will grow up feeling worthless; he will feel the need to be perfect. He won't be able to admit that he's wrong and he won't be able to form healthy relationships. He will spend most of his adult life (if he makes it through his teenage years) feeling like he's broken and that he was abused by and taken advantage of by the two people who were supposed to protect him. He will feel like he is at fault for being born and ruining his parents' lives, when he had absolutely no say in the matter. I wish that emotional abuse was taken seriously enough early on so that kids could be saved before they started to withdraw or act out or bring guns to school. I wish that someone would show up at our neighbours' door and take their kids away until they could prove that they were capable and willing to deal with their own problems and then do what was best for their kids.

 

I have suspected for a while that my energy has been misplaced. I really love video games and good tv shows and being at home with Dan. I love being on facebook because I can see what's happening in the world even when I'm too tired to go out, or feeling too introverted to want to call anyone. But I only have so much energy to go around and I can tell that thinking of others and giving my time is more of an effort than a natural outpouring. I do want to live my life that way, but I also like the life that we've been living. Dan is surprised by how much I miss facebook because even he didn't know how much I relied on it for connection and entertainment. I think that certain things, if given the chance, can override our balance and make us think that we can't live without them. They're not always all that harmful, but they trick you into thinking that other worthwhile things will take too much time away. Video games, tv shows and facebook are like that for me. I love them, but I let them have too much of my time. When we lived in Ontario there was a really sad story in the news about a boy who ran away from home because his parents had taken away his x-box. Eventually it came out that playing online, he had gotten to be quite well known for his skill and that he spent most of his days in his room. He was missing for quite a while and he was eventually found in a field, having died from chest injuries from falling out of a tree in the middle of the night. I wonder, if he'd had the chance to know his future, whether he would have thought that his x-box was important enough to die for. Anyway, without facebook I have so much time that I hardly know what to do with myself.

 

I think stories about celebrities are generally annoying, but every time I read one I always find myself thinking that we're not meant to be containers. Celebrities are the focus of too many people; we obsess over their grocery shopping habits, we give them too much credit for being beautiful or talented (if you want to see real talent, watch some I Love Lucy celebrity episodes) and we pour more attention on them than they have rightly earned. And a good number of them fall apart. By being a container I mean that we're not really meant to have things poured into us without some sort of outpouring as well. People, even celebrities, are not made to handle this overload. To be fair, these thoughts come about because I have been a one-way street. I generally think more about myself than others, I prefer tv shows to interaction with people, I let being tired keep me from all sorts of things and I have a hard time giving this stuff up for something more meaningful. As a result I've been depressed and I feel like I'm half dead. I feel like my life has no Life in it. I think we are the most alive when we let things go right through us. Things come in, things go out. We receive kindness, we show kindness; we are given rest, we give someone else the chance to rest; we are loved, we love others. This is one reason that I believe in God, because He was the first to show us that this is how life should be, and I discover all the time that it's actually true.

 

Just before I left facebook, someone posted that they didn't understand why people would give up facebook for Lent because you're basically just giving up friends and family. Someone else commented that instead of depriving themselves of something, they choose to replace something with another thing that is more meaningful or healthy. I am sensitive to what other people think and say, and I really wanted to defend myself more than I did, but I couldn't because I'm not allowed on facebook. But it's been on my mind for two days now and I guess not everyone understands what it's about. I made the choice because instead of connecting me to friends and family, it disconnected me from my sense of worth. Instead of being something meaningful, it stole all of my time from anything more life-giving. So not everyone gets it, but for me it was the absolutely right choice and I did it for the right reasons: because God feels distant and my heart is half dead and no amount of facebook validation in the world is worth that.

 

PS. In place of facebook time, I'm resuming cello lessons. Woot!