“Don’t compromise yourself. You’re all you’ve got.”
~Janis Joplin
This entire blog post is one of the most difficult to write, mostly out of fear of how it will be received.
The subject is about as popular to discuss as head lice and constipation.
Even harder to confidently present as a query even among the closest of acquaintances.
Because it is a new phenomena.
One Click Social Network Unfriending.
The new break up dilemma.
Everyone is aware of the problem, or the hardship of the online friendship.
Even Facebook has installed new additions and levels to your privacy exposure to “friends” on Facebook. With their new “Take a Break”, “See Less of”, “Unfollow” and *Custom fields, even each post has a setting. This weaning of friendship, this struggle really is, for lack of a better word… real.
Because this is a new frontier.
In this way of associating, we are truly infants.
Our parents never had to figure this type of relationship out, there are no rules of order for social network friendings, or unfriendings. We accept friends, based on their asking, we initiate friending to others by our own requests sent. We want to know more, understand more, expand our circle… but often, we do so without knowing enough about the people we are associating with and revealing our personal lives to.
What started out as a way to get to know people, network, share pictures and life events, has quickly spiraled into a very personal, heavily opinionated and often heated and angry exchange of political and personal views. It seems that once we collectively started sharing a little, some of us didn’t give a flip if other people out there might be offended or at least hurt by the negativity that spewed forth like an open carotid and some weren’t happy until they exposed the bare nakedness of their unwillingness to care about any of it.
And we need to remember, this is an entirely new animal.
Most of us were raised to be polite, show courtesies and treat one another the way we would want to be treated. In our personal lives, we used to keep mostly to ourselves, sharing with a select few about our lives, life events, politics and schedules. Now we open ourselves up to so many people that we really are over exposed and under prepared for the wake of all this exposure. We truly have compromised our circle of trust and sacrificed a lot of our well being in our efforts to be “social”.
A question I posed to a my husband this evening as well as a friend earlier in the day involved the difficulty that exists in “unfriending”. In the physical social world, we associate with people of our choosing, we expose ourselves and regress or retreat from people that we don’t respect, fear, or otherwise no longer want to associate with, simply by no longer venturing into that company.
Now, where we are virtually in everyone’s living room all the time, there is no curtain to draw, door to close or gate to shut behind us other than clicking the unfriend button. And yet, for some reason it feels more harsh. Even if we have people that have hurt us, damaged our spirit, churn out negativity like it is a livelihood, we still, often hesitate.
I told my husband today, if one of our children, had a friend that created drama, was unhealthy for their spirit, mocked their religion or exposed them to negativity on a daily basis, we would have no trouble seeing them ushered out of their lives and yet, we can’t seem to do the same for ourselves.
We need to come to terms with the fact that just because we all live in this world, it is okay to limit our exposure to one another. It is also okay to know that for our own health we can just say no to having to exercise our patience and bite our tongues. While I think tolerance is integral in growth, not everyone is good for us. Not everyone is safe, or trustworthy with our personal information and life. We do not need to constantly exist in a state of defense or mindless acceptance.
We need to understand that in this new world of social acquaintances we are going to have to learn to do the hard things, make the difficult and uncomfortable decisions to protect our spirits, our mental health and our Peace.
In the long run, we have to be friends with ourselves, first.
The View From Here 