Is Social Media Bad For My Mental Health?

I’m going to start by saying, overall, I know my answer is no. I love it more than I hate it but it is a pendulum that swings quite rapidly between the two. The connectivity and creativity it has allowed me to have over the years, not only with my own family and friends but also with an audience across the globe, is incredible. An audience who, by watching my videos, reading my writing and listening to me sing, have inadvertently opened up doors for me that would have taken me a lot longer to open on my own (If I haven’t said it enough…THANK YOU, BY THE WAY!). However, when things take a slightly snarky turn for the worse, social media can become frightening and my mental health can dip to a point that triggers off motion sensors which force me to shut off from Twitter and Instagram. I spiral into a circle of explaining, watching someone misunderstand part of my explanation, then explaining part of my initial explanation which is then also misunderstood…it can get messy very quickly and suddenly I’ve wasted hours that I will never get back and should never have wasted in the first place.

There are many reasons why I sometimes want to throw my phone into the sea: watching others live seemingly happy,  100% glorious, well-balanced lives is a big one. Usually, that’s because in comparison, I’m eating an Easter egg in February with one hand, feverishly writing my book with the other and have worn bolognese stained pyjamas for seventy-two hours straight. Another big one and the main one I want to focus on in this blog, is when five people are “calling me out” for something no one should really be “called out” for. I have a tendency to convince myself that these five people speak for the entire population of planet Earth and therefore the entire planet hates me. 

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve f***ed up online before. There have been times when I’ve been called out and rightfully so. I’ve done my best to try and understand where I stepped out of line and then held up my hands and said “Yeah. That was really stupid. I’m so sorry!”. I hope my audience know that I would never try to be an arsehole intentionally and any subsequent arseholery is entirely accidental. That doesn’t excuse the arseholery nor does it mean no apology should be given but I do feel intention is important. You’re less likely to forgive someone for purposely stamping on your toe than if it were an accident, right? But there have been soooooooooo many times when I have received messages from a handful of people about something that I could never have anticipated nor do I really know how to respond to.

My first encounter with something along these lines was back in the days of good ol’ Myspace. I made the hilarious discovery today that my myspace page still exists so if you want a laugh, click here. I was about fourteen and I was messaged by someone insisting that I apologise for my brother’s band writing “devil worshipper music”. Now…for any of you that have listened to Mcfly you will know they write lyrics such as “There was nothing on Earth that could save us, when I fell in love with Uranus” and “the rumour’s spreading round that she cooks in the nude”. I think there are bands out there who are probably far more likely to be “devil worshippers” than Mcfly but even so, here was this girl trying to make me apologise for the fact her mum had confiscated all of her CD’s on the grounds that my brother’s band were lovers of Satan. Fourteen year old me wasn’t well versed in the ways of the internet and I stupidly engaged in conversation. I found myself defending my older brother and his indifference to the Devil for hours and hours and hours. I didn’t understand that whilst everyone should have a voice, that doesn’t necessarily mean everyone should be listened to and as a result, I remember finally telling my mum what had happened in floods of tears because there never was a resolution and if there's something that frustrates me beyond belief, it's a lack of closure. I couldn’t make this girl, who was probably also very young, understand. I should have learnt that valuable lesson there and then that not everyone will understand and not everyone will want to understand and that’s okay. You just have to walk away! 

Am I any better than my fourteen year old self now, though? Have I learnt that lesson? Because I still find myself in tears over my keyboard having convinced myself that the entire world hates me and thinks that I, myself, am the anti-christ. Not too long ago, I posted an instagram story in which I was holding a disposable coffee cup. I have a KeepCup  (A brand of reusable coffee cup, they’re amazing!) that I love and use often but on this occasion, I had left it at work the day before. So, on the way into work the following day, I resorted to using a paper cup that the shop provided. The response was as if I was single handedly holding a hairdryer on full-blast directly at the polar ice caps whilst simultaneously winding plastic beer holders around the necks of baby turtles. Trying to be as “green” and waste-free as possible is something that is very important to me which I do my best to support. Hence, buying the KeepCup in the first place! However, the response to a paper cup seemed disproportionately hostile and was definitely unexpected. It was the same when I posted an Insta story in the back of an Addison Lee cab that had been booked for me by a company I was working for. A few people assumed it was an Uber I had booked myself and sent me various messages in the style of “HOW COULD YOU USE SUCH AN AWFUL COMPANY?!”. Or the time I said I would write captions on all of my Instagram stories but then forgot a few times and was told I was being “irresponsible and flaky”. Or when, in passing in a vlog, I referred to Belfast as Ireland and not Northern Ireland and almost caused an online civil war between those in Ireland who cared and who didn’t. Or when any competition I hold is “UK only”. Something gets picked up on almost weekly and I get to thinking…am I really one of the bad guys? Out of all the actors, YouTubers and “personalities” out there, am I really up there with the worst of them? Am I one of the villains? 

I find it so easy to let the walls of social media close in around me when things get negative. To be fooled into thinking that the internet is real life and there’s nothing more to it except the glaring screen in front of me. The internet is a funny one because it is real life...and it isn’t. It is in the sense that it’s real, human beings but those human beings often saying things they’d never say if they weren’t behind a screen or even saying things they don't mean simply because...they can. I also often think that, had social media never been invented, no one would have the same kind of access to strangers in order to formulate an opinion in the first place. That’s why I feel like we need to be careful when formulating our opinions on things that we wouldn’t usually have the opportunity to access outside of the internet and we need to step back and ask ourselves why we care so much about people we don’t know…but this I feel is another conversation for another time...

I sometimes find it difficult to decipher when someone is angry at me for something they personally wouldn’t do versus being angry for something that no one should ever do. Then again, I sometimes feel the majority of people who perpetuate “call out culture” can’t tell the difference either which is maybe where the bigger problem lies. I like keeping the peace and I can often (but not always) see where people are coming from, even if they detoured down several side streets, back alleys and went by Wales to get to the point. However, the apology those doing the “calling out” usually expect for small discrepancies is a formal statement to the entirety of an audience, most of whom didn’t know or care about the situation in the first place. Which means I end up alerting a lot of people to something negative that they otherwise wouldn’t have known or cared about. So, do I only apologise to the individuals who are offended? Privately? Is that apology enough? Or do I not apologise at all and come to terms with the fact that a handful of people is not even my whole audience let alone all of planet Earth and sometimes, I don’t need to waste my time explaining myself to those hell bent on misunderstanding. Sometimes, Fletcher, people will be angry at you for something they personally feel isn't right but that doesn't mean what you've done is categorically wrong. It's just a case of people conducting themselves differently and That. Is. O.K.

However, I find it so damn hard not to say sorry when someone says “You’ve offended me”! I think that's human nature not to want to upset people! But, and I say this with caution, we do live in a world where people are often offended by seemingly literally everything. For example, last week a couple of people sent me messages after I had said on Instagram I had bought “squirrel-proof” bird feeders. Apparently, I made it sound like I didn’t want Squirrels in my garden nor did I want to feed them and I was contributing to the starvation of grey squirrels in the UK and preventing them from their normal patterns of hibernation. I also received a comment yesterday about not having the correct scientific formation of snowflakes on the front cover of my next novel and they needed to be changed because it just isn't chemically possible...*Slow blink*. These days, I feel like the lines are blurring between the genuine and the ridiculous and I can’t quite tell what warrants a genuine apology or when someone’s expecting a little too much from one singular human being.

I’m trying to live by “safety in numbers”. If it seems like a very large group of people are genuinely upset, that’s when you need to step back and take a look at your actions. However, if it is only, like, five people who seem to have found some strange nuance in between the lines of what you actually said/did then you need to work on not responding. And I need to work on that HARD. 

How arrogant do I have to believe the entire world is watching and cares about me using a paper cup or squirrel proof bird-feeders? Get a grip, Fletcher and learn to recognise and then ignore the blatantly ludicrous. Whilst I feel that everyone’s opinions should be acknowledged and respected, I don’t believe all of them should necessarily be listened to or taken on board and I need to learn to stop caring and just “do me”. I feel this is vital to my future on social media.