So. I just began deleting friends and then suddenly choose to deactivate my Facebook account. This really sounds so lame in the scheme of life and yet it actually stirred up many peculiar emotions inside of me!
Oh Facebook.
The land where you can distract yourself for hours looking at other people’s lives, comparing, snooping and even gossiping. Feeding an illusion of connection and yet veering on the edge of great disonnection. Its also the place to try on ‘look at me’ and ‘how great my life is’ or the ‘stomping ground’ for everything you visibly stand for. None of this is really good, bad, right or wrong and really any label or judgments we carry are more about ourselves.
Although I realize I am certainly not the first person to say it is a MASSIVE distraction from our reality. I am simply choosing to become more authentic and apparent in my actual world….my real life and stop posting pictures and shit updates to appease myself and my ‘friends’ perceptions about my life.
I want to SHARE but from a different place inside.
Sharing from my deep authenticity and sharing to connect…really connect with those who are looking to create something different. I want to connect with those who are hungry for their lives and who are starving to make a collective conscious difference in this world. I want to share that which I love BUT without the mindless calculation or care about what ‘others’ may think.
Oh Facebook.
It has become a place where we can merely become a by-stander and look through a screen at all the things we like or don’t like. Me. I AM a creator and have been feeling lost by simply looking at the things I wished I had created. I’ve tailored my facebook account to unschooling pages, writers, artists and spiritual activators. And while I too am ALL of these things in my life, it seems that I have lost my voice and my creative force by slowly becoming a by-stander. Again. Not good, bad, right or wrong. I am simply coming to realize that as a ‘creator’ who chooses to ‘stand by’ ….that inevitably my world and reality will reflect that! I realize that I share the pages and posts that inspire me and touch my soul AND yet secretly wishing it was my words that I had shared.
I realize that I want to BE fully IN my life and not tied up with how it looks on the ‘outside’ and how I am ‘perceived’ by my list of 525 friends. There is great vulnerability with admitting this to myself and to others that ‘fuck yes’ I care about what others may think and what stories they conjure. I am human…we are all human. I think in the land of Facebook we have seemed to have lost some of our authentic humanness. Tied up with the appearance of our lives and how that ‘looks’ from the outside. Really. Everything in our external culture and world beckons us to we deeply care about what others think.
We have made our real inner worlds less accessible to ourselves and certainly not accessible to our LARGE lists of ‘friends’.
That’s the trick with Facebook. It gives us the illusion of being connected with others and yet ironically creates more separation from within. At least for me – I have to admit to hours upon hours of wasted time spent gazing at a device and extremely separated from MY touchable WORLD….the one right in front of me. This constant ‘temporary’ disconnect from within has led us to share ‘what is on our minds’ and less of what is ‘in our hearts’ and to go even deeper to ‘whats in our souls’.
And so. Deactivating this ‘social’ pass time and becoming brutally honest with myself and what it has represented in my life has been rather liberating. It is simply a choice to be present.
~Ange Arbuckle
