I left Facebook for a month, and it triggered a depression. It’s the best thing that could have happened!

Have I been lying to myself all this time? Lying to everyone else? I think I might have been. And now I’m being forced to face the truth.

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina 🇺🇦 on Unsplash

After 9 years of sobriety from alcohol, cigarettes and weed, I decided, on a whim, (because is there any other way to do anything?), that I wanted to do a social media ‘Dry January’. More specifically, a Facebook Dry January. 

It wasn’t even my idea. I saw it, ironically, on a post from a Facebook friend who shared that she was doing it. It was January 2nd, and it seemed like such a good idea. I knew I spent too much of my life on Facebook. Other social media platforms are available of course, and I used them too, but Facebook was my drug of choice. 

I didn’t do it immediately. I spent some time thinking about it, and then got my son to change my password. He will let me back in at the end of the month, and not a moment before. 

I stayed on Messenger. Some of my real conversations with friends happen there, and I didn’t want to cut myself off from my friends. Just to give myself a break from the scroll.

It felt really good. Like that moment you go on retreat and turn your phone off, because now it’s time to relax. I eagerly thought of the things I might accomplish in the time my absence from doom scrolling would give me. I pictured all the words I’d write, the clean home, the delightfully connected time with my son, the sleep, the sense of wellbeing I’d experience.

Oh, how the gods laugh at us mortals and our foolish imaginings.

I just didn’t see it coming at all.

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I’ve always been a big fan of digital distractions. I’ve often wondered if I’d have got a first in my degree if I’d spent less time playing Solitaire and more time on my essays (staying sober and not getting stoned would have probably helped with that as well).

I played Snake on my Nokia 3310 relentlessly until I got a HUGE long snake and the highest score I’d ever had. I knew I’d never be able to beat that, and suddenly the pointlessness of it hit me and I never played it again.

I joyfully dived into Friends Reunited, until the moment I drunkenly messaged my comprehensive school crush, apologising for being such an embarrassing twat in my blushing, stammering, dropping things whenever I saw him adoration. He never replied, and I deleted my account not long after. 

Myspace was a game changer. Myspace gave my digital addiction a purpose. Myspace gave me friends. 

Through Myspace, I started to make friends beyond the confines of the small valley I live in. For a lonely single mother, with no single mother friends, this was huge. It opened up my world, and gave me some very real connections, meeting people with shared musical tastes, and even reconnecting me with my son, who I hadn’t seen since he was 6.

Some of those friends, and that son, are still in my life today. 

Discovering RekordsRekords, the Queens of the Stone Age fan forum, changed my life completely. Now I had friends to go to gigs with all over the country, friends I could talk about music and life with all day long. And I did talk all day long. I was on that forum all the time, and I loved it. I made some friendships there that still endure to this day, almost 20 years later. 

In around 2008, we all started to drift to Facebook, and left the QOTSA forum behind. Facebook was fun. It was silly. It was a great place to connect, to chat and to share interesting things. I was hooked very quickly.

And ‘hooked’ really is the right word, isn’t it? We know that right from the start, Facebook has been actively working to trigger the parts of our brain that keep us coming back for more. The notifications (“ooh, someone likes what I said, I am validated”), the ever changing feed triggering our need for novelty, the echo chamber effect of the algorithm that only shows us more of what we already like, so we end up thinking everyone thinks like us. The feeling that we might be missing out on something important if we’re not there.

And of course, it’s not just Facebook. Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, they all use similar tactics. To get your content seen, you have to engage, post, engage, post, engage, post. The ancient Gods demanded sacrifice to keep them happy. The modern gods of social media demand our attention, our creation and our data.

Is it a price worth paying?

__________________

I haven’t had great mental health for a long time. Maybe not ever. 20 years of alcohol abuse didn’t come out of nowhere. Four decades of undiagnosed ADHD takes its toll, and I have many scars across my psyche.

The past few years have been some of the hardest by a long way. From my diagnosis of ADHD in 2019, which was a huge relief, but also left me questioning my whole existence, I experienced a breakup followed straight be a global pandemic, work stress, single parenting stress, financial stress, and anxiety that saw my fingers torn to shreds as I picked and picked at the skin despite the bleeding and pain.

At the tail end of 2021, just as we were starting to put ourselves back together after all the lockdowns, the ground I was standing on fell away. My Mum had liver cancer. 

My Mum who stopped drinking years ago. My Mum who had probably only got drunk a handful of times her entire life. My Mum, who ate well, who was fit and active, had lots of hobbies, who did all the things the NHS recommends for a healthy life. 

That Mum. My Mum. She had liver cancer and she was going to die. 

Those 11 months of her illness were some of the hardest I’ve ever experienced, but I am profoundly grateful for them all. I wish they hadn’t happened for at least 20 years, but in those 11 months, I got to let go of a lot of old resentments, and connected with my beautiful Mamma with more honesty, compassion and acceptance between us than we had experienced before. We’d healed a lot of the tensions between us over the miles we walked together since my brother died, but this was something else. Suddenly all the irritations didn’t matter anymore. No more need for blame, resentment and anger. In the end, there was only love, and there is only love.

And I miss her so very much.

Since she died, I have probably used Facebook more than I did before. I felt so lonely in my grief, not wanting to burden my father, brothers, sons, or friends with my pain. So I would open up Facebook, and scroll. Sometimes I’d engage, other times I just letting it all wash over me.

As I started to recover a little, and started training to be a recovery coach, I started to share more about my recovery and sobriety, enjoying the reactions I’d get from people who read my posts. 

But feeding these gods is exhausting. They take more and more from you all the time. Come up with ever more ingenious ways to demand more of you. And give less and less in return. Just like the ancient Greek gods, we give them our worship, and they fuck with us for their own amusement and gain. 

A few days after the start of my self imposed exile from Facebook, I had an appointment with a menopause specialist GP to discuss some issues I was having with my physical and mental health. I suspected they might be menopause related, but I wasn’t sure. As we discussed my mental health, I started to cry, and had no idea why. 

A couple of days later, after shouting at my son and swearing at his new phone because I couldn’t get him set up on apple music on it, I took myself off to bed and sobbed. Coming downstairs to a worried face, and an “I don’t know what I did, but I’m sorry”, I cried some more, went out to the kitchen and took my old antidepressants out of the cupboard, cut one in half and took it. I think I need these.

The days since then have been a confusing mix of good days and bad. The good days are days in which I can move my body, vital for my ADHD, can laugh and smile with my son, and don’t cry (too much). Well below my usual standard for good day! 

The bad days are spent mostly in bed, or standing bemused in the kitchen as I try to work out how on earth I am going to cook a meal when my body won’t move and my brain seems to have stopped working.

I’ve been wracking my brains trying to work out what has triggered this. I know that ‘I’ve just had too much to deal with for too long’ is entirely possible. I’ve certainly been struggling with my mental health a lot over recent years, and have often wailed that “I just want a bit of time when life feels easy”. 

But I realised with a jolt a couple of days ago that the absence of Facebook might have actually been the final trigger for a much needed acceptance of my poor mental health.

While I have social media, I can pretend. I can pretend I’m connecting with people, pretend I’m doing something productive, pretend that I’m not lost. I can put my worries aside and stare into the void of the scroll. I can always find a new shiny object to chase, a new thing to be outraged and upset about that isn’t my immediate problem, something stupid and pointless to waste my time and energy on.

But as I have said to others so many times in the past, we don’t heal or solve our problems if we distract and numb ourselves from them. 

In the times I feel lonely, I will gain more from connecting with a friend I can go for a coffee with than scrolling through Facebook, not really engaging with anyone. Or from simply sitting with that loneliness, and accepting it.

When life feels overwhelming and difficult, talking to friends, writing, meditating, or going for a walk will help me find solutions far easier than wandering into the social media void. The answers and solutions aren’t there. They never have been.

I am not enjoying this depression that I am experiencing. It’s left me feeling completely disabled, unable to trust that I can follow through on any plan I make, unable to talk to many people, and feeling like I’m letting everyone down.

But the compassionate part of me knows that I’m not. I’m on a journey of healing. One that, if I allow it, will lead me to more happiness, inner strength, and resilience. Accepting that I need to rest, to process my emotions completely, not just partially. And letting myself rest deeply. And freeing myself from what is, I think, my last addiction.

The resilient part of me knows that even though it feels awful right now, this depression is a good thing. It is forcing me to take the time to heal and process what I’m feeling. 

Right now, I don’t want to go back to social media at all. I’ve not been on any of them since I logged out of Facebook, and I don’t want to. I know as a self employed recovery coach, I might have to when I’m ready to get back to work, but I am going to see if there are other ways I can do it. 

Just the thought of seeing the Facebook feed makes me a little anxious right now. I feel the same way about social media as I did about alcohol when I stopped. And THAT tells me that I need to let go of it in just the same way. Celebrating the benefits I get from abstinence, and not worrying about what I might think I’m missing out on!