One Last When Facebook Becomes Blogging

This will double as a message to everybody reading this rather than just the people who commented here.

I haven't answered the responses here for more than a week. I'm cutting down my facebook consumption for a time, possibly for more than a time, perhaps hopefully more than a time. It occurs to me that so many people in my life know me more as a social media presence than the actual person. I'll still be posting in cultural forums which are the things I really care about, and more than happy to keep in touch on facebook messenger or possibly by text. But this kind of exhibitionism is a chapter in my life that I'd like to be over.

I'm concerned that by presenting a public image of myself that is at once both a kind of weirdly pathetic 'public intellectual'/comedian, the more the 'real me' explodes out and makes itself known to a potential infinity of unsuspecting eyes, and the more the 'real me' therefore becomes the person who struggles profoundly with the battery of mental illnesses which it would be prudent not to expose to a thousand acquaintances at a time.

There are people out there who are struggling more than I and far more worthy and needful of people's attention and sympathy than I. I do my best through deeply complicated flaws, delusions, extremes of mood, and all the things that go along with those traits of character. What this comes down to is that I am not equipped to live through many circumstances which other people take for granted without basically insurmountable amounts of mental duress, so how much moreso is that then true for broadcasting my thoughts instantly on social media?

The time has come, as best I can, to gather my thoughts and emotions, if I'm capable of gathering them at all, into something more lasting, organized, thought through, well-considered before I vomit them to a public of acquaintances I barely know, and social media friends who think they know me but know only a two-dimensional version without context. The internet, or at least the internet of 2020, flattens everything, it makes heroes and victims out of deeply complicated people, it tells people only the very literal truth without the context. I began posting here nearly ten years ago as a way of trying to strike back from that, but I became the caricature of what I really thought and in that way am clearly like everybody I was angry with.

You'll probably still see writing on this page, but probably less often, of a length nobody here wants to read, and I am absolutely done with sharing articles and scrolling through a feed of other people that pissed me off, filled me with anxiety and despondence, and made me more and more the person I less wanted to be.

Appropriate Sentiments until next time,

Evan