How a FB Memory Re-Converted Me (to Social Media)

No wonder my mom was worried.

Looking at myself from five years ago—rail-thin, smiling fiercely in my birthday purchases—the story starts coming together in my mind.

I think I’m ready to tell it.

The Short Life of Eatsleepwriterepeat.com

This isn’t my first blog. I started one well before that picture was taken and then never did much with it. I didn’t know what to say, but I also wasn’t converted to the “why” of it yet, or to the “why” of social media in general. I’d simply started it because doing so was the consistent advice of emerging and established writers at the conferences I’d attended.

Why start a blog? Why post to social media at all?

The conference answers are: to build a fan-base, a brand, to advertise yourself. Agents want to see that you’re already social, prolific, and actively engaged in the work of it all.

Ultimately, however, the conference answers weren’t enough for me then. I had works in progress at the time, but I didn’t think I was ready to talk about them yet and figured my time was better spent working on them instead. The blog died, only a handful of posts dying with it. One of those posts was simply a picture I found online—Gollum with the One Ring and the caption: He went to Jared. I had no idea what I was doing, and to be perfectly candid, I’m still probing in the dark here, but in a room that’s become slightly more familiar.

Deciding to Speak

I used to post to social media more frequently. It was the nature of my job once upon a time, but even then my marketing attempts were lackluster. I just hated it, personally and professionally—the tension that comes with accumulating “likes,” the etiquette of emojis, the bandying of opinions, my inability to remove my emotions from anything the least bit confrontational.

Engaging online was wholly absorbing, even physically taxing. It still is, and for all these reasons, I became and remained a social media lurker, my infrequent posts innocuous and pet-centric.

This blog and this post signify my conversion, or re-conversion, to the very aspect of social media that scared me off of it: the megaphone of it all, the current of voices, their stories and assertions. Mine had dissipated from the stream, my voice retreating not long after that picture from May 8, 2014 was taken, posted, and commented on by friends who cared about me, laughed with me, and showed their support with their likes.

After facebook recently yanked that photo from the obscurity of my feed and offered it up for my evaluation—Is this snapshot of your life important? Is it worth sharing again?—I reread the comments. I felt things. I thought, Thank god for five years. Thank god for change, for friends who stick it out with you.

I thought, I want to talk about this.

I’m glad my life ruptured. And I’m glad that I now have five years of healing between me and that picture.

Terrifying Your Family: A Crash Course in Five Steps

Step One: Leave Your Religion

This part is most effective if all six of your close-knit siblings (and both of your parents) were once missionaries for said religion. Even better if each remains devoted to their membership and are churning out new members with assembly-line efficiency.

Step Two: Get a Third Piercing

If I could do that third piercing again, I wouldn’t go to a mall kiosk—I’d go to a parlor—but damn was it a rush to tuck back my hair and see that initiatory stud in my cartilage. There I am, was the thrilling impression. I’m coming together.

Your family won’t see it that way, however. They’ll see it as further proof of your defection and they won’t be wrong. That’s exactly what it is if the leaders of your religion have actually, unequivocally forbade more than two piercings for women, one in each earlobe, lest you become a harlot, which leads us neatly into Step Three.

Step Three: Start Partying

If you do this part well, people will start unfollowing you on facebook. You don’t even have to be the one to document your newfound revelry, but pictures will be taken, you will be tagged, and you’ll notice that at least one member of your extended family will delete you from their feed. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to show up to family events on Sunday in progressively shorter skirts, hungover, and wearing Saturday’s makeup.

Step Four: Leave Your Marriage

For best results, do this part sloppily. Draw it out. Be selfish. Do things that will make you sick in retrospect. You’ll begin to hate and terrify yourself too in the process, which will send you headlong into Step Five.

Step Five: Find Yourself Something Toxic

If you’re anything like me, the throttling anxiety you’ll be feeling at this stage of the process will have you dropping pounds like it’s hot and you’re in a club and the DJ is demanding it. Then, while you’re already struggling to maintain an appetite, find yourself someone who will yell at you in an Olive Garden because you didn’t order enough food for yourself, someone who’ll accuse you of making him look “like an asshole.” Whatever anticipation you’d felt for that gnocchi soup will dry up like your tongue, and you’ll go yet another day with an unsustainable calorie deficit.

***

Do all this and the people who love you most in the world will be quaking with terror for you. Do this and eventually, if you’re lucky, your life will rupture like a spleen.

The Aftermath: Reducing Your Family’s Terror to a Simmering Concern

I got the boots I’m wearing in the picture off of Woot.com. A friend sent me a link, knowing my love of leather, boots, and retail therapy. When they arrived, I held and smelled them. I cried. And that is not a stable response for a non-vegan. The Star Wars leggings, the three-sloth moon shirt—I was grasping at reasons to feel happy as I shrank in more ways than physically.

I was experiencing the results of my own choices and in no way am I trying to accumulate pity*, but perhaps empathy, because I know that my story isn’t rare—the crossroads, the life transitions, the bewildering discovery of yourself amidst things, people, or behaviors that are truly, oppressively poisonous.

I also know that I became an object lesson during this time, my flailing construed as a direct result of sin, waywardness, rebellion. The thing is, I wouldn’t change a single thing that I did. But with the information I have now, I’d do the same things differently, and that’s why, under this blog category, I’ll continue to share what I think I’ve learned in the hopes that my experience might resonate with anyone else. (Other categories will cover what I’m working on and reading, and my thoughts on the work of writing.)

I’m glad my life ruptured. And I’m glad that I now have five years of healing between me and that picture. I flatter myself that whatever concern my family feels for me now is (I hope) the backdrop wish for health, safety, and happiness that we can’t help but feel for those we love, and not the confounding gut-punch that is watching someone self-immolate.

Today I work out regularly, I run with Kylo, I drink to enjoy and not to escape (which means a whole lot less), I’ve gotten more piercings, I make reading and writing goals and meet them, and I marinate in the peace that comes from uprooting toxicity from my life and embracing anything and anyone that lifts me up.

I eat.

One of my best friends bought me a crop top. Always hungry, it reads across the chest.

And it’s true—in more ways than one, my appetite is finally raging.

* Disclaimer: Another thing I do not intend to do with this post is weight-shame. It’s instinct to assess each other based on looks and ignorance to lean on those judgments. In my situation, the weight loss was a sign of mental health issues that I was barely discussing with anyone, but my general practitioner at the time wasn’t concerned. I was underweight, he said, but not severely, yet I can promise that the shame I received for it elsewhere did nothing to help me get to a healthy weight. Ultimately, my therapist did that.