…or are these exhausting times?

I’ve mentioned before my kinship with social media.  I am very aware of the pros and the cons but for me, the pros outweigh the con’s, so I indulge.  My recent hiatus was an eye-opener and illuminated the changes in me while I abstained from indulging.  The changes were positive and were improvements in things like appreciation of relaxation time, increased time to sit with my own thoughts and taking advantage of the extra time to read a bit more for pleasure.  And yet, here I am, writing another post about social media.  This is telling me something!

It was Canada Day.  To be clear, not the *fault of Canada Day but rather seemed to result from Canada Day.  Or perhaps, came to a (another) head after Canada Day.  I spent the day away from my work laptop and was able to spend some quiet time with my girls. At the end of the day I sat and opened the three social media apps I use – Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.  I have listed them in the order I tend to access them and that is the first insight I discovered.  Two years ago, I would have listed them in the opposite order – Facebook, then Instagram and with Twitter as an infrequent afterthought.  Prior to my hiatus, the order was Twitter with Instagram the afterthought and Facebook a rarity.  Having learned some lessons over the social media break I recognized Facebook as my ‘family’ place, the place where people I know personally and well and have interacted with as family and coworkers post their stories and photos about family, food and goings-on.  Instagram, for me, is the place I ‘follow’ people…some friends and co-workers but also some entertainers, sports figures, and some organizations as they talk about decorating and cooking, share some photos of their personal life or life in training and news about current successes and new business. Twitter is my political place.  I still follow some entertainers, sports figures, and some organizations but Twitter is also where I follow politicians and news media.  And, of course, I know that the posts I see in my feed are by my own choice. Twitter seems to be a very angry place these days.  I understand the correlation between the content and comments and the sources.  And I understand the climate we are living in today.  Environmentally, medically and politically, each is angst-inspiring but coming together they create a powerfully toxic result.

So…back to Canada Day…it was at the end of the day that I picked up my device and started to scroll. I started with Instragram and was immediately struck by a contradiction; on the one hand there were multiple lovely “Happy Canada Day” messages accompanied by lovely photos and creative designs depicting Canadiana icons.  I was a bit surprised though that there were not as many happy greetings as I’d expected but chocked that up to the fact that I do follow a lot of people who are not Canadian and quite honestly, people in other countries, especially our neighbours to the south, have other things on their minds these days.  Having scrolled through several posts and dug into some of the comments I was disappointed to read so many negative responses to the well wishes.  The comments were full of statement of resentment that we would celebrate Canada Day when there is still so much reconciliation work to be done.  There were comments objecting to having a Canada Day at all.  I found so many people had hopped on the ‘cancel culture’ bandwagon.  The original effort was to use social media to withdraw, or ‘cancel, support for public figures, politicians and companies after something had been said or done that would be considered objectionable or offensive.  What I was seeing though was not that.  It was shaming, challenging and correcting individuals for expressing their personal sentiments – Happy Canada Day!  What I’m sure for some was intended to be a nudge to enlightenment and forward thinking felt more like superiority, humiliating, discrediting and silencing….a form of suppression, even censorship. And perhaps the most deflating for me were the comments from our official political opposition party spontaneously referring to the day as Dominion Day.  This was head-snap moment worthy of whiplash for me.  Without turning this post into something akin to a history lesson, my recollection is that, upon Confederation on July 1, 1867, we established the Dominion of Canada under our very first Prime Minister.  In 1982 we formally patriated our Constitution and moved from celebrating ‘Dominion Day’ and started celebrating ‘Canada Day’.  I was around back then, for the patriation of the Constitution that is, and it was a great day. 

This all came to light for me when I moved to Facebook and after a multitude of ‘promotion’ posts and advertisements, most that I have absolutely no interest in and certainly don’t follow or subscribe to (but that is another story for another day) I came upon the post of someone who I used to work with.  This would be one of the posts that I look forward to seeing, updates of what people are doing since we parted employment way, the changes in their families through various milestones, some happy and some sad, all shared with a genuine spirit.  In this post my friend was reposting a reminder that mental health issues can impact people all around us without our awareness and came with the challenge to reach out to our friends and not let the busyness of our days distract us from noticing when someone is not feeling well.  The post ended with the request to post a comment of ‘Done’ then to copy and paste the post in its entirety into our own feed. 

That last line hit me like a ton of bricks.  A wave of exhaustion washed over me accompanied by feelings of sadness and disappointment.  I absolutely know the content of my friend’s original message is always an important one and especially a timely one these days. In that moment though, I knew that I personally could not repost this or any other ‘challenges’ because I, again personally, feel that I am beginning to press the threshold of my capacity to manage challenges.  Any challenges.  All challenges.  Today we are challenged to fight a pandemic, challenged to work-from-home or, for the not so fortunate, not to work at all. We are challenged to be more sensitive, more informed, more insightful. We are challenged to be diligent in caring for the devastated environment and the political climate.  We are challenged to keep physically distant from family and friends, to not hug our children and grandchildren, to wave at our loved ones from the sidewalk, to ‘drive-by’ and honk for people celebrating birthdays and graduations.  We had to ‘visit’ our elderly through the windows of nursing homes, the sad reality that someone else’s child was holding our parents’ hands instead of us, if they had the time, and that our loved ones’ poor eyesight or confusion prevented them from even seeing us at all. 

It seems what appears to be simplification of our lives, the imposition of restrictions intended to keep us physically protected and safe within our own four walls has perhaps made us more vulnerable to emotional and spiritual unwellness.  It appears to certainly have opened a floodgate of frustration and criticism.  Maybe I need to re-evaluate the pros and cons of social media…. Or perhaps it’s just time to re-evaluate my contacts.

Be safe….be happy…be joyful!