Keeping to myself and keeping it simple

It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve cut my Facebook activity to close to nothing. So far it’s been alright. It took me a little effort to keep from tapping the FB app on my phone. Sometimes I would slip and the app would start, but then I’d press the Home key before it loaded up. There are times when I take a quick look, but only because Facebook sends me notifications on my phone. Excited, I would check it out hoping that someone was trying to contact me, only to find out that was not the case. Thank you, FB, for trolling me. 

But then I close the app and move on. I don't think about it after that. I consider that a victory. 

The main reason why I’m keeping a low profile (ha ha) in social media is because it isn't serving my needs. I tend to focus on others, even above myself. I go out of my way to read status updates that comes my way. If I thought I had something clever to say, I would take the time to craft a response. I used to spend a lot of time doing this, even at work or in the place of other activities like reading, or cooking dinner, or laundry. Eventually this lead to sinks full of dishes and a really dusty room (thanks to my psoriasis flaking off) - resulting in a consistently bad mood. 

Neglecting my own ego was fine as long as I got likes and acknowledgements for the things I post. But lately those have dried up, in part to Facebook's tendencies to not broadcast my posts, and without a healthy lifestyle to fill the void (thanks to all that negligence), the lack of attention made me even more sad. 

So I decided to take a step back and be my own cheerleader for the time being. It may seem extreme to remove myself in near totality from social media but I had to shake things up a bit. It’s hard to break out of a negative mindset when you don’t know you’re in it. Pulling myself out of FB jolted me out of that sad reality and allowed me to look at things from outside that system. 

I’ll get into what I’ve been doing to with my time in another post. But for now, all I want to say is that I’m sticking to the basics. I need to focus on showing up to work on time, cooking my meals (instead of always eating out) and doing my laundry (instead of wearing the same shirt twice in a row). I will add more complexity to my life, such as writing projects, classes, and maybe even cleaning my apartment, after I can comfortably do the things that I need to pay rent and eat ramen.  

As I said last time, I stretched myself way too thin in 2014. I'm going to try to keep myself together this time around.