What Are We Holding Onto?
Rethinking my nearly two decades of social media use
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I moved four times across four states before I turned 18.
Moving at any age can be difficult and each of those moves hit me in different ways. One thing that remained a constant was the struggle to leave old friends behind and the desire to hold onto those friendships as I navigated new social interactions in new places.
All of this happened in the 1980s and 90s. Long-distance phone calls were far too expensive and out of the question for me as a nine and eleven-year-old. That didn’t change much when I was 16, but at least my parents were more willing to allow me occasional phone calls to my best friend. We had a computer with dial-up internet, but I still didn’t have my own email address. That would have to wait until I was a second-semester senior getting ready to leave for college. I needed a new email address to easily communicate back and forth with my soon-to-be college roommate.
In order to keep in touch with friends, I had to depend on letter writing. I wrote to friends I met on youth group gatherings all over the country. I wrote to my childhood best friend from Detroit and the friends I left behind in Illinois. I wrote to my high school best friend and my high school crush (who only ever wrote me back once). I wrote to the boy in Illinois who became my first official boyfriend, even though he broke up with me before we could ever go on a real date. And even though I had access to email, I wrote letters to the boy I would eventually marry when I spent a semester abroad in England. I still have a couple of boxes of treasured letters that I received from friends over the years.
Here’s the thing with letter writing: it forces you to be intentional about who you stay friends with. It takes time. You have to be patient. And if you don’t matter enough to the recipient, that relationship will eventually just go away.
That was a hard truth to handle as an adolescent ripped away from worlds she loved. As I tried to make new friends and adjust to a new life, I clung to the memories of friends and places I didn’t want to leave in the first place. Those people and memories mattered to me. I didn’t want to see that, while those things mattered to me, they didn’t matter as much to the friends I left behind. They still had everyone else. They still had their home and school and favorite places to hang out. Life moved on, whether I liked it or not.
After years of barely holding onto a small number of long-distance friendships for the first 25 years of my life, the introduction of social media changed my life. My husband had a MySpace account, but I just couldn’t bring myself to commit the time and energy to create one. I didn’t really see the purpose.
But when Facebook sprung on the scene, it was a different story. I wasn’t an early adopter, but I joined soon enough. By 2007 I was searching for long-lost friends from childhood, high school, and college. I found my Kindergarten crush and my childhood best friend, the three of us reconnecting twenty years after I moved from Detroit and they continued to go to school together through high school. I found my first-grade teacher and my college adviser. I friended extended family and started frequently messaging my college roommate, my student teaching partner, and my freshman neighbor, three friendships that continued to blossom and grow as we changed and faced adult challenges we never anticipated. Former students friended me, and I was able to keep up relationships with students who I grown close to while they were in my classroom and I directed them on stage. I enjoyed watching them grow from teenagers to mature adults living their best lives. I joined Facebook groups for AP teachers and other professional organizations and received a constant stream of helpful professional development.
Then gradually, things changed.
Because I didn’t start spending time on Twitter until its last glory years, I got most of my news from my Facebook feed. I ignored the growing reality that most of us were living in increasingly siloed information feeds, the news I was getting significantly different from the news of many of my other Facebook friends.
But this became painfully clear in 2016, as I watched with growing horror the number of friends and family members who posted terrible disinformation about Hillary Clinton and ignored the decades of evidence in plain sight that highlighted just how unqualified Donald Trump was to be President of the United States. People who I loved and respected appeared to lose their minds as they continued to believe and spread lie after lie that just kept traveling around the internet.
How could I know that this would be the beginning of the end of my social media love affair?
It wasn’t just the politics, which I had me feeling like I was shouting into the void. As my children approached their teenage years, they became more aware of my posting habits. They realized there were pictures and videos of them all over my Facebook feed. They started asking me to post about them less. And the older they got, the less I posted about them, even as they were growing into interesting teenagers doing things that made me proud. I wanted to brag about them, but I also wanted to respect their privacy, so I started sharing pictures and videos in family group chats instead, leaving my photo sharing to places as opposed to people.
At the same time, I was also trying to grow my audience as a writer, well aware that if I ever wanted to turn a hobby that helped me maintain my sanity into something that made me money, I would have to have more readers than just those few on my Facebook feed who were willing to click. A friend recommended I start an Instagram account, something I had fought against for years because I didn’t love the ways pictures were displayed in the earliest iterations of the app. I slowly realized I had been missing out on years of photographic delight as I followed travel accounts and the accounts of some of my favorite creators. I enjoyed sharing my own travel photos with others and found a new way to stay in touch with people. Then I opened the Twitter account I hadn’t touched since I first started it years before. As I watched the political upheaval around me and struggled through my own faith journey, I found so many others having the same struggles. For the first time, I found complete strangers who were “my people,” individuals who were dealing with similar struggles and didn’t have many people in their own lives with whom they could talk out their questions, worries, and new discoveries.
But nothing is static. The only constant in life is change.
I started spending less and less time on Facebook as I got tired of having my heart broken over and over by what I saw loved ones posting. It wasn’t that I wanted to be oblivious, but the knowledge made me more cautious, less open, and I started putting up more walls to protect my heart and mind from what I was witnessing.
Twitter always had its faults, but it completely lost its shine once Elon Musk got his hands onto the company. I eventually closed my account. I didn’t even back up my data.
Instagram became a void. I continue to post, but I joined the platform that was supposed to help me grow as a writer too late. The audience is saturated. The words I’ve spent so much time writing and photographs I’ve carefully curated go largely unnoticed.
I joined Threads (which is currently the only META platform I actually enjoy right now) and Bluesky, but I’m not sure how much I want to use them. I want to be an informed citizen. I want to share my work. But how much is too much?
I’m tired of performing. I’m tired of trying to catch peoples’ attention. I’m tired of baring my soul and the number of likes and views making it painfully obvious that people are not seeing it, or worse, that they don’t care.
And yet, I struggle to say my many years of social media have been a net negative.
There are good friends who have become even better friends over the years because we’ve been able to easily stay in contact. When I started to have more questions and struggle through politics and faith and then a crushing job loss, complete strangers were there to help me make sense of the world. During several phases of my life, different types of social media have been there to help me navigate some pretty tricky waters, and for that I am eternally thankful.
But then I also realize that human beings are not created for countless relationships. Yes, we are social beings. Even introverts, like myself, need to have “our” people. Human connection is a determining factor in mental and physical health and even long life. But there is a limit to how many people we can realistically be close to. Some friendships are only meant for a season. We are not meant to cling to them, allowing them to hang by a fingernail. As we grow, our friendships grow and change as well. Sometimes they grow together and sometimes they grow apart. This is true of even some of the most significant friendships in history, which hit home as I recently read a book about the friendship and collaboration of JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis.
Some of our childhood friends are meant to be just childhood memories. Many of the adults in our lives are meant to be just a part of our past. Some of my favorite teachers are not on social media, and while I would love to be able to send them an email, I don’t need to know all about their lives and they don’t need to know about mine. (But seriously, if anyone can find the email addresses for Mr. Jim Kennedy of Riverton, Wyoming so I can tell him it’s his fault I’m an English teacher, I would be grateful.)
Do I know what all of this means for my immediate social media future? No, but it’s forcing me to make some important decisions. The truth is, I don’t believe my life is worse off because of the nearly 20 years I’ve spent engaging on social media. I’m just not sure my future will be better with it.
What that means is still to be determined.
My social media journey:
“Does This Further the Kingdom?”
Looking for other commentary on social media? Check out the following pieces:
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I am rethinking it all. Your post really resonated with me!!
I’m tired of performing. I’m tired of trying to catch peoples’ attention. ---- oof, I felt that one. Really loved this essay and it his home, really hard.