The facebook question

Lately, I have been debating whether or not I should disable facebook. It is a game of vacillation that I am sure most of us have played at some point after joining the monolithic site. It really just comes down to this simple question: Does having facebook actually enable the development or maintenance of friendship?

For me, I think the answer is no. In the past month, three people that I have never met or heard of, and with whom I share no common friends, have friended me. I cannot tell you who these people are, how they found me, or what they decided was friend-worthy about me. Because I am not a facebook friend-purist, I accepted the friend requests, but I can promise you that I will never meet these people, and I will probably never even know why we are "friends."

For people that I already know, facebook does not help me maintain the bond of friendship. If you are really my friend, chances are that you will be able to contact me without writing on my "wall." It is likely that I will read a text sooner than I will check facebook. Or, how about sending me a good, old-fashioned email to stay in touch? Yes, it might take longer for you to write than a "what's up?" on my wall, but I can guarantee you that I will get to it as soon as I would a facebook message (if speed of transmittal is a concern), and a one-sentence, rhetorical question written in barely decipherable English on my wall does not a friendship make.

Then there is the mysterious phenomenon of facebook friending every person you have ever known from elementary school and on (and yes, I am guilty of this). Why do we feel an urge to "stay in touch" with people we knew only for a short while or people we will likely never see again--or even care to! I have the impression that we are, in general, unwilling or unable to rationalize the fact that just because you know what a person ate for a dinner, you are not necessarily "in the loop."  It is as if we equate quantity of vague, ubiquitous facebook statuses like "going to bed" and "waiting for the weekend" with quality of communication.

If these questions were only philosophically troubling, it is likely that I would not even consider leaving facebook. But, the fact is, facebook is beginning to depress me--or, rather, I find that after cruising the site, I feel depressed. I have been trying to figure out why, and I will offer some hypotheses, but I would be interested to hear some of your responses. Let me know if any of you have felt the same way.

One reason facebook may be bringing me down, I think, is that I have noted that many of my former classmates have been announcing engagements. Now, I thought a lot about this, and the reason that this makes me depressed is not because I too want to get married. I think that it is because I too would like something significant and congratulatory to include in one of my statuses. As it is, I feel that my achievements are meager and hardly worth commenting on. "I ate a new food today" or "I finally left the apartment in a last-ditch effort to dissipate an anxious and self-deprecating funk" just does not measure up with "I'm engaged to so and so!"

On this note, I think that facebook is inherently a competitive medium. People write little blurbs about themselves and keep others up to date with their latest goings on, but, in so doing, they are opening up their lives for comparison and competition. I am sure I am not the only one who has drawn conclusions about where I am in life versus where another person is in life from facebook profiles. And because we are safely sitting at our computers, we are free to inflate a little. So are other people. This just adds fuel to the competitive fire, and I am just not sure it's healthy.

This may have become more of a rant than I intended, but I think the facebook question is an interesting one, and I am sure that everyone has an opinion. So, chime in!

Finding my voice

Since my internship at the radio station is drawing to a close, my station manager asked me to do a write-up on what I have gained from my experience. I thought it would be nice to include it here (minus names of people and places, for privacy's sake), since it is applicable to an overall growth I have gained this summer:

When I began interning at X, I knew nothing about radio. I had just spent the last four years of my life getting a college degree in biology. After graduating in December, I had trouble finding a job that was relevant to my academic experiences. After a few months of luckless job-hunting, I expanded my search to opportunities outside of the scientific sphere. I applied to jobs and internships indiscriminately, hoping that I would get in somewhere. I applied for an internship at X. Less than a week later, I received an email from the Station Manager expressing interest in me. I was stunned, thinking that I would have to apologize for my lack of experience and inapplicable academic background.

Nothing of the sort happened. The Station Manager and the other people working at X welcomed me with open arms. It did not matter that I was inexperienced with broadcasting; all I needed to do was show up, eager and ready to learn. Surprisingly, I found that I grew comfortable with the methodology quite quickly. I discovered the immense satisfaction that stems from creating a news story, beginning to end. Not only could I give a voice to issues that I felt deserved airwave recognition, like the city’s first gay pride parade and the mysterious colony collapse disorder affecting the nation’s honeybees, but, in the process, I could find my own voice as well.

 I have always been shy. I struggle with talking to new people, both in person and on the phone. A big part of creating news stories, however, is interviewing. Although it was very difficult at first, I discovered that my shyness diminished after making numerous phone calls and conducting several in-studio interviews. Over and over, I was able to prove to myself that I can introduce myself to people I have never met and converse in a professional manner. In no small way, losing this anxiety has been life-changing for me.

I am now used to the sound of my own voice. Strange though it may sound, after hearing myself on-air several times, I realized that the way I actually sound is far more flattering than the way I sounded in my own head. Many of us lean towards self-deprecation when we imagine how we sound to others, I think. But listening to how I objectively sound improved my self-concept. I did not sound silly; I did not sound stupid. I sounded like a young woman who has something to say and who can say it in an eloquent and thoughtful way. I hope that I can take this lesson and apply it to the rest of my life, no matter what I end up doing.

Final lesson learned: Take every experience that comes your way. You never know where it will take you.

I am a little alarmed: where are the female role models?

After reading several novels recently in which all of the female protagonists faced sexism, abuse, and ageism, I have grown despondent about the status of women in fiction. I know, every good work of fiction needs adversity, but where are the novels in which women nonetheless persevere while maintaining positive self-images?

I did a Google search today, hoping to hunt down some uplifting, female-centered books. I did not find any. Everything in my search results related either to Christianity (nothing against books like this, but I was hoping for something non-religious) or to stories of women who eventually triumphed...but not before enduring traumatic life events.

So, then I decided to expand my search to non-fiction. I tried using words and phrases like "feminism" and "female role models." Getting the impression that the words  "feminism" and "hope" are mutually exclusive, I nonetheless searched for "hopeful feminism." My results included excerpts like, "the unhappy daughters of feminism," "let's put the fun back in feminism," and, my personal favorite, "feminism is dead." I did not find anything that made me feel hopeful.

At the beginning of this fruitless exercise, all I wanted was to read something that doesn't make me feel like I am screwed because I am women. I have enough self-loathing, self-defeating thoughts on that topic, so I didn't want to cram my head full of confirmatory readings. Now, however, I am wondering whether girls and women today have many good role models. The general consensus on Google, at least, seems to be that there is a lack (and therefore a need) for uplifting, positive messages for today's female population.

I hope that in the not-too-distant future, things will improve. While the messages of society were in no way wholly responsible for my ED, they did play an undeniable role in the development of my disorder. I firmly believe that any women who has an ED needs to expose herself to as many pro-female books, role models, and ideas as possible. The question is, where are they?

I'm back

Things are better than when I signed off a few months ago on a hiatus. Sorry that I dropped off the face of the earth-- I had a non-anorexia-related health scare that has since been resolved.

Some things have changed since I last wrote. I am living in a new apartment, enjoying the fact that I finally have a place I can call my own. The ghosts of the past that flitted palpably about my old house are gone, and, in fact, I am making quite an effort to stay healthy in my new place so that I do not create bad memories or set unhealthy precedents. I have noticed that the first few weeks of living in a new place unavoidably set the tone for the entire duration of my time there. If I were to restrict right now, for example, I would associate my new apartment with restricting, and it would be quite tricky to eat healthfully here. That is a major problem that I had living at my mother's house the first half of this year. I developed anorexia in that house, I almost died in that house, and I will forever feel slightly haunted in that house by my ED past.

Another thing that has changed is that I have grown to love interning at the radio station. I am actually becoming comfortable with calling people, scheduling interviews, recording myself--all things that make me anxious. I even participated in making a promo video for a pledge drive the station is having at the end of the month. I have always dreaded the thought of seeing myself on film. Mirrors are pretty testy, but there is nothing like seeing yourself in 3-D. I am proud to say that I did not engage in any ED behaviors after watching the video--a major accomplishment.

Some things are the same. I am still not making money, and I am still worried about finding a job. I have put out feelers at my internship to see if they might higher me after the summer is over, but it seems that they do not have the funds. It is public radio, I know, but I would love to be able to get a little bit of money for my effort. I am also still missing school. It makes me wistful to think of how I might have been going to graduate school this fall. School was and is the only thing about which I feel confident and accomplished. I know that it is of course not too late for me to go in the future, but because I do not have any solid plans now, it seems less like a reality.

I will try to write regularly again. Thanks to those who stuck with me! :)