This might be cliche- people are always deactivating their Facebook and “making changes.” Almost as if a Facebook deactivation is a kind of a “New Year, New Me” kind of thing. Except instead of a New Year’s Resolution, this is a Facebook Resolution. Point is, I deactivated it again today.

I’m not always one of those people to say I’m going to deactivate, follow through, and be back in a few days. I have gone months at a time. I plan to do at LEAST that much. I have seen positive changes before- given up Facebook and filled those moments of time I once wasted with something constructive instead. Downloaded Duolingo and finished the entire Portuguese program that way, and found I can actually understand a good bit of the language when watching Brazilian tv such as “3%!” (It’s a Netflix show, a pretty good one I might add). Anyways, why do I need to deactivate this time?

I just feel so lonely and isolated lately. I find that Facebook exacerbates those feelings. I actually know and value plenty of people! I am also sure that plenty of people actually do value and care about me. I just can’t relate to them and do not think they can relate to me. Most of all though, I can’t relate to the way most other people think or experience life. Maybe my thinking or my experience has just been skewed? I have been through a strange combination of life tragedies.

I am not saying, by any means, my life is worse than anyone else’s- or harder. I know people all “feel” life differently. I also believe that our emotional “pain tolerance” is hugely dependant on what we have personally experienced. What I mean is that one person’s devastation and “end of the world despair” may actually feel just as deep if their issue was seemingly simple in comparison to another person’s. Even if the first person in my example is a toddler who accidentally let go of a balloon they had to watch fly away, and the next person actually lost someone they loved. Emotional pain, despair, sadness, depression- these aren’t things we can measure. So we really can’t compare them. It is all relative.

Me? I just feel like I do not know many people who have experienced the combination of things I have. Abuse, loss of both parents at a young age, divorce at a young age, being by my child’s side as he fought for his life through a serious illness as a small toddler, diagnosis of my own serious medical condition, blah blah blah and im not even in my mid thirties yet. But it all still sounds so mundane on paper. I forget the word. But I think about the same things over and over and over again also. Not rumination. Another word I read in a book lately. But I basically obsess over everything. Every little detail of everything. And so im traumatizing myself over and over.

I just think. All the time. Never a quiet mind. Nothing seems to help. Facebook sure doesn’t. So back to Duolingo I go, but I will also see if writing helps me to cope.

This is my description because I have no idea just yet what all I will write about. But, the description of anything unwritten can only be in the beginning, if it has only just begun.