Silence vs. "Social"-ization

An Interesting Story, by William Wood, 1806 (Public Domain, from the Met Collection)

I've been thinking a lot lately about the destructive force of noise in our day to day life.

When I was accepted into Pitch Wars last year, I became painfully aware of my lack of interaction on social media, which seemed such a mainstay in other writers' careers and career development. I was the only Pitch Wars writer not on Facebook, so I attempted to make up for this by keeping up with Twitter in a way I'd never attempted before.

It was crazy, guys. I mean, I set mad goals like: write at least three tweets a week. Check Twitter every other day. Follow all the agents I'm querying. Reply to all tweets in which I am mentioned. Crazy. ;) But what can I say, I'm an overachiever.

Here's the thing...even my mild use of Twitter was too much for me. My anxiety, already exacerbated by some health and life issues, went through the roof. There was too much noise, too much drama, too much angst...just too much. I'd be happily celebrating a writer friend's success when Bang! there'd be a tweet about some social media bullying another writer had had to endure. Or an agent would make a snarky political comment that crossed a line into hate speech. Or I'd see that an agent I'd really been hoping for had just signed two new clients, sending me into a spiral of anxiety that my book would never be good enough.

I'm not saying that Twitter is bad. I saw enough evidence of its goodness to be firmly convinced that it's extremely beneficial for many writers. But not me.

I've talked before about personality types, and how much it's helped me to identify my own: INFJ (introvert, intuitive, feeling, judging), in the Myers-Briggs way of putting it. Here's what I should have remembered: INFJs are sponges. We can't observe another's pain or anxiety or anger or sorrow and leave it at that. We soak it all in...for better or worse, and sometimes both at once. I'm going to venture to guess that most INFJs need to come up with a serious filtration system if they don't want Twitter and other social media to encroach too much on their sense of peace and need for silence.

My filtration system: delete the Twitter app.

I'm sorry that I haven't been able to keep up with my friends who primarily share their news through social media. I miss that, a lot. Since I stopped checking Twitter, I admit there have been several times when I have felt isolated and alone on my writing journey.

Luckily, the solution wasn't far off. Even though I couldn't keep up with everyone (but, really, how are we supposed to keep up with everyone??), I could make the effort to send emails to writing friends and critique partners, to meet up in person with local writers, to spend more time at the library and book store. For me, embracing the social and discarding the media has been key to finding balance in my writing career at this point--even though, admittedly, I still need to make more effort at being faithful to these commitments.

Will my plan change in the future? Probably. We're human, and if we're not changing, we're dead.

I hope any writer friends reading this will feel free to send me an email (or even a comment!) if they were worried that I was dead, thought I didn't care about their writing career, or otherwise wondered about my inactivity. I really do want to keep up with you. But I needed more silence, more authenticity, and more peace in my days.

Because this silence? It's leaving me room to write...to ponder...to create and craft and read and even occasionally clean my house. (Not very much of that last one, though. I'm 6 months pregnant. Let's be realistic.) Silence is making be a better person, and I hope that will make me a better friend, even if it means you don't hear from me as often.

Sorry that this is so long and personal. I'm not offering any solutions, just my considerations on what has been a period of interesting choices in my writing life. I'd welcome your own thoughts and opinions on social media, silence, and how to find balance...