I love change, couldn’t live without it,
have to have it. But I also have trouble with it. Why do I need to change things? I credit my mom, who moved the furniture around every season and often put us in the car, unexpectedly bound for grandma’s house or Dorothy’s apartment in San Diego.

I have changed my blog design.
No big deal, but I wasn’t posting.
I needed a change to invite me back after Marleen died. Is that what needing change is about for some of us? I couldn’t go back to those last two posts, couldn’t follow up or talk about 6 months of grief, 6 months of forced change.

In my profession, I liked to fix things, especially things that needed editing or polishing. Some things not only can’t be fixed, they shouldn’t be made to look any better than they are. So that’s where I leave 2011. I just leave it — alone. There is no epilogue, no proper end. Just a relief.

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I have a new art gallery! Please come take a look…

I am only slightly interested in working again at anything creative. It all seems so pointless. I suspect my enthusiasm is dampened by loss. I just want my therapist back. I want little else other than to retain what I have left.

So it was with this disspirit that I came to delete a couple hundred “friends” on Facebook the other day.

Well before my therapist died, I began to notice that Facebook was making me depressed, yet I couldn’t help viewing the news feed many times a day. My friend list had grown over the years to include mainly people I had never met, only encountered on the internet. More recently, I collected quite a few old classmates right before our 40th high school reunion. I guess because I am lonely, I made a habit of watching their lives go by, family events, personal successes and complaints, and I always felt a fondness, like to people I know but haven’t seen lately. But, largely, these are not people I know, and they do not know me. There wasn’t a lot of interaction between us either and I came to suspect that most of those people I was watching were not watching me back (few likes and comments).

Then I read this book:

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection by John T. Cacioppo, William Patrick

and… this great article from 1956 about the media and para-social interaction.

I found the book after an internet search for “para-social relationships”. What I found was a description of what I was experiencing on Facebook. A para-social relationship is one in which one person knows a lot about another person that doesn’t know you exist. Like fandom. Like TV characters. I personally like several TV characters enough that they seem like real people to me — people I like! That is a para-social relationship. It’s not hard to imagine that this kind of one-way street wouldn’t be as fulfilling as one with a real person that will reciprocate.

There is a difference between TV and Facebook. The difference is that TV characters allow you the vicarious thrill of wearing different personalities from the safety of your living room. The fact that these people don’t really exist is a good thing. That’s what makes it safe to envy, hate, or adore them. The only dark part of idolizing TV characters is that their counterparts — the actors themselves — could care less about you. But if you know that, there is little harm in having fun following a show. TV characters are a little like avatars or surrogates — they are inherently unreal and you would never expect them to respond to you.

On Facebook however, the people are very real, and seeing them daily with their family and friends became frustrating to me. I’m lonely, and they evidently are not. And they could interact with me but most don’t. That’s what was intolerable. The belongingness mechanism that Facebook activates can make you miserable when your friend got dozens of birthday wishes from people you know and you got very few. It feels very much like school days. And whatever happened to emailing? I haven’t had a non-business email from anyone in a long time, much less a phone call. I think Facebook has supplanted real life in many ways. How about letters? When was the last time you saw someone’s actual handwriting? Are we all avatars, all the time?

So I deleted everyone from Facebook that I have never met or had an actual conversation with unless they had been interacting with me on Facebook via Likes or Comments. Otherwise I am reducing myself to being an audience when what I really want is lunch with a friend.

My life is a bit lean right now. It won’t always be that way but won’t change drastically any time soon. I’d like to live my life with as few delusions as possible. I think this makes for less anxiety. If I am to deal with how large the loss of my therapist is, I need to let myself feel how truly small my world is without her.

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p.s. I can’t believe I wrote a post about Facebook as if it really matters. How absurd. And yes, I realize there is some irony in maintaining a blog projected at strangers but it helps me to define what I am feeling, even if it is unread. My words here are not me, just my exhaling into the blogosphere. And lastly, I am going to experiment with not replying to comments here unless I am asked a specific question, even though I really like getting comments, because I think it may cause apprehension for the commentor about how I might respond, and it does cause me apprehension when I do respond. So write away, without restraint. I read everything you write

Here are some related Facebook articles:

It’s the finality of it, all the questions I will never get to ask.

No, it’s the unfairness of it—waiting for the other shoe to drop, it started to rain shoes.

It was the coincidence, the irony, the reverb and sequence that was shocking.

Or it was the poignancy, the cruelty and obscenity, the horror.

Why her and why now? She remains a cloak wrapped around my brain. Every hour spent with her formed the basis of my ability to withstand the loss of her. How ironic that She is the reason I can live without her.

She was the leader, out in front, with no one to protect her, all of us behind, all of us injured, but She was confident that, injured or not, we could go on. She decided at the end that she may not want to—she hadn’t considered that, except theoretically.

Mental pain and suffering was her forte. She confessed to having no defense against physical pain and suffering.

She’s not suffering now, but I will miss her terribly. She was my second Mom and closest friend.

I dreamed I forgot to water my mums—both of them—both withered and about to die. I spill water all over the floor, a flood of tears I step in.

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Dedicated to my therapist,
Marleen Josie Doctorow Ph.D.
February 15, 1947 – June 13, 2011

Meet you here in 2 years and we’ll see what we will see…

Times are changing here at my house, in my life. Good change, hopeful change, meaningful change. The fact that this change will manifest itself towards my destiny very slowly, is something I can’t control. I mean, if a boat comes to rescue you at sea, you should not complain about the speed of the boat, right? This will not be a quick journey b … Read More

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