Facebook, Twitter, and Nudist Neighbors

I tend to  have a love/strong dislike relationship with social media. On one hand, it has been a great tool in allowing me to connect with people that I wouldn't normally connect with. On the other hand, social media can be weird and mean and ugly and confusing. But going back to how it has helped  me connect with people..... 

I have this weird thing that I have dealt with for most of my life:  an inconsistent introversion, where I spend a lot of time in my head, combined with moments of being somewhat outgoing. I want to connect with people, but sometimes taking that first step to make that happen doesn't even occur to me, and if it does occur to me, I sometimes don't know how I should go about it. Therein lies the problem. I try to always be friendly, and I never knowingly or intentionally shun people or anything. I just don't say things sometimes. I think a lot of things that never make it from my brain to my mouth, simply because it never occurred to me to say those things out loud. Then Facebook came along. Suddenly, Facebook was asking me what I thought. "Well, Facebook, right now I am thinking that giving myself a bloody nose with the visor in my car was kind of annoying....". For some reason, typing that was more natural than saying the same thing out loud. Suddenly, things that would normally just stay in my head  had another option. I would see my Nudist Neighbor on his balcony playing solitaire, and mention it on Facebook.  My Facebook friends loved my Nudist Neighbor. Eventually I would run into my Facebook friends in public, and we would have something to talk about. It was the automatic icebreaker that I needed to connect with people. Through Facebook I am in touch with former classmates, former teammates, former teachers, the first boy I ever kissed (and the rest of his family), the people who worked at my favorite record store in college, the people I met on the night President Obama was first elected, and people who thought they were "friending" my sister Kris, but who stuck around because they either like me, or they would feel bad "unfriending" me. It has been great, for the most part.

But then the election happened. Facebook got pretty ugly for a while. So I started spending more time on Twitter. It was my social media happy place. I didn't tweet a lot. I mostly followed writers and musicians and science blogs and travel blogs and animal rescues and TV shows and Nathan Fillion. I guess I was a lurker. I would go to twitter to laugh about absurd things, to read about genetic mutations, to see which cities in the world had the best record stores, and to try to win tickets to concerts. It was pleasant. But then I started following people who had similar interests or people who followed me. The thing about twitter, is that if you follow the wrong people, your feed becomes full of craziness.

One day, I was having a particularly rough day. I don't remember the circumstances, exactly, but I remember I looked at my Facebook page and saw  a lot of ranting. So I went to Twitter. I don't remember what had Twitter all a-twitter, but my feed looked something like this:

"This sucks."

“You suck!”

"You are a jerky faced poopy head butt nose!" (except it didn't say jerky or poopy or butt )

I looked a little further, hoping for something positive, but stumbled instead on a group of mean tweeters picking on someone else. It was too much. The things that people were saying to each other honestly hurt me. Sometimes, when people are so angry with each other, and throwing hurtful words around so carelessly, it feels like my veins are on the outside of my skin, or like my spine is exposed. When other people are hurting each other, I hurt.  On some days, Twitter can be full of hurt, because it offers people a sense of anonymity, and people forget that there are real human beings on the receiving end of the hate filled tweets. I couldn't handle it. I needed something good, something positive. Then I remembered a friend had told me about a link to a live performance by Mavis Staples and Jeff Tweedy, so I thought that might help turn my day around. I asked her where to find it. She told me that I could look in her "favorites" on her twitter page, that I would probably have to search quite a bit, but that the performance was worth it. I was making my way through her list of favorites, and that is  when I saw it. Not the video, but something I needed even more than that. The only positive tweet in a sea of negativity. I wish I was savvy enough to put a link to that tweet, but I am not. I did, however, write down part of said tweet , by someone named Emma. It said : ".......be grateful for even your mistakes, they make you who you are & somehow who you want to be." Well, geesh. That was exactly what I needed right then. Gratitude has a way of overshadowing even the most negative and hurtful things. Suddenly, it didn't matter that all those other people were so negative. This was what I needed to hear. So I started following her, and stopped following all of the Negative Nellies. It changed the way I dealt with Twitter, and as it turned out, that person had an almost magical ability to post  amazing little messages that were exactly what I needed to hear.  It gave me back my happy place.

Just a few days ago, that same person tweeted this:

"You never know- a small seemingly insignificant interaction you have with another might mean the world to them. Make every moment count."

Truer words were never tweeted.