Howdy, folks. I’ve been thinking a lot the past couple of days about Facebook and my mental health. For the past while, I’ve been more and more fed up with the sort of environment Facebook fosters. I have many friends on their whom I really value and enjoy connecting with. And then I have people I know fairly well, people I barely know, and people I don’t know at all.
Nine times out of ten, when I have an exchange on Facebook that leaves a bad taste in my mouth, it’s with a person I don’t know at all, or someone I barely know. And you know what? In all the years of blogging, I don’t recall a single time one of those people has changed their minds about whatever it is they’re all in a huff about.
So why keep doing it?
Well, one reason is that I still want to be connected to all the people I *want* to connect with. Another big reason is that I believe my posts help people. Maybe not a zillion people, but some people. They provide comfort or clarity or extra resolve. And I really (really) don’t want to give that up. It would feel like I was being intimidated out of talking, and that rubs me the wrong way.
So . . . what am I going to do?
For starters, I’m NOT going to stop posting to Facebook. If I blog something, it’ll still appear over there. However, I’m also not going to police or patrol things. I’ll say my piece, and then let it do whatever it’s going to do. Everything will be sharable, and I continue to encourage everyone and anyone to share whatever they like.
If you’d like to still interact with me, you can leave comments on my blog. Right on the posts themselves. I’d like to shift more and more away from Facebook to an environment I have control over. My website is one of those.
With this in mind, I have resurrected my email newsletter. It got tangled up in fake subscribers, and I set it aside, intending to iron it out later. Later turns out to be now. I have unsubscribed everyone, and then sent an email to everyone who had subscribed with an invite to re-up. You’ll still get a weekly email with everything I’ve blogged about, as well as (maybe) an occasional sale, deleted scene, special, or whatever comes to mind. (I’ve now followed AI’s instructions to take steps to prevent the spam subscriptions from happening again. Let’s hope it’s right.)
So if you were a former subscriber or want to be a new one, please head over here to sign back up. I really believe it’s more important than ever that we stay connected, but I’m less convinced each day that Facebook is the best vehicle for that moving forward.