winsomer:winsomer:I just want to say, life got a lot better when I stopped caring about having an...

winsomer:

winsomer:

I just want to say, life got a lot better when I stopped caring about having an audience. if you want to talk about personal stuff on your social media, that’s fine, but it certainly wasn’t healthy for me, personally, though I don’t know that there is a way of doing this in a healthy way. so many years were put into making…like… a performance of my hardships, because I could either have the instant gratification of people’s sympathetic comments, the occasional absurd satisfaction of people challenging me (and then others defending me), or even the chance to say “oh, cool, nobody cares about me, as I thought,” when posts like that got no attention. I pulled others into, and myself got sucked into, really unhealthy friendships and toxic interactions (an entire, abusive long term relationship, even), and I worry all the time about young people going through this phase, depending on this addiction because they think they don’t have anywhere else to go and it’s so easy. 

I don’t know, this came about because I occasionally compare how much I share online now versus how much I shared ten years ago, and frankly, it was fucking dangerous. I wish I had journaling ten years ago the way I have it now. It’s so much more cathartic to write everything down in a book that I can keep close to me and get the chance to be very choosy about who is allowed to read it, when, and always physically present. 

I guess it maybe comes from this idea that a lot of people are seeing it but that it’s safe, because it’s online? ‘I can’t see and don’t really know the people who are interacting with this, and what would they use this information for, anyway? it’s fine, also I’m getting attention and it’s nice, this is harmless’ or at least I think that was the case for me. I didn’t realize how, actually, I was enabling people and putting parts of myself and my life out there that other people did not need, and absolutely used, to my knowledge or not. and that’s fucking scary. and not just text posts, but like, photos of me. I got into the relationship I was in previously because a stupid post with a series of photos of me spread like wildfire for a hot second on here, and I hate it. the blog I created that post on doesn’t exist anymore, but that post always will, it probably still gets reblogged, I know it’s somewhere in my ex’s archives, it sucks. I was a teenager. the internet is so great for so many things, but it’s also a really terrible, goddamn dangerous place, like my parents always said, and I don’t know how to convey this to my young siblings or other young folks I care about, as this place gets more and more dangerous all the fucking time.

Good points in this. I’ve come to regard the internet as an amazing tool that can unfortunately also be used as a weapon.