Me and social media

This may or may not be a long one... best pop the kettle on, grab some snacks and make yourselves comfortable just in case!

I’m sat in the Women’s Health Hub with a sleeping baby and pondering how we raise awareness of the support we have available here at the Hub, and most importantly how we ensure that people are able to access it.

One of the biggest challenges I faced when I first became a mother was finding places to get good support, particularly with breastfeeding (I have discussed this in a previous post here), but the next challenge was finding people that understood what I was going through. I still find this second part quite hard if I’m honest – I sometimes jump too fast into being far too open about the complexities of life, rather than going gently through the introductory conversations. There’s a lot of talk on social media right now about being too much and I feel that quite strongly. Too much and not quite the right stuff... needing clarity and openness, but also needing there to be compassion and empathy at the heart of it all. And plenty of room for both grace and understanding.

I feel like social media posts don’t quite enable me to fit all of that in! I use too many words because I’m trying to keep it clear, I share too many posters or maybe not enough posters, too many pictures or maybe not enough pictures, and not quite the right tone... I sound like I’m trying too hard or not trying hard enough. I haven’t got quite the right angle or maybe the picture captures the part of the wall where the paint has chipped off, or there’s a stain or a blemish on it, or I’ve focused on the wrong part. Do people really want a picture of my face, or my cup, or the book I just read... my brain heads into overwhelm and I deal with it by not posting. Instead I lose myself in one of the many other jobs from the to-do list I wanted to write but didn’t get the chance to yet.

Wait a moment though, I promise I’m not looking for sympathy - pop the teeny tiny violins back in their boxes, for now at least. I just really want to know if anyone else feels this way about it all? I see social media experts popping up on my feed all the time suggesting I do their course or read their book, I even bought a fab old library book to fix it all - a bargain at 50p!

I really struggle to use social media in a way that doesn’t feel a bit icky. It can do such wonderful things, and it brings us all together in some ways, but it also keeps us all apart in so many others. For those of us with neurodivergent brains, it can be exactly what we need to avoid the awkwardness of eye contact or the distractions of the conversation next to us, but I am starting to wonder if it also makes it a little bit harder to return to the face-to-face world when we’ve had a break from it. The more I have to do some of the hard things, the less terrifying and hard I find them. This is my personal experience, and very generally speaking, and with many provisos obviously such as rest and recovery time!

Since setting up the Hub with Zoe I’ve learned how to post stories, navigated the world of content schedules, and I’m even thinking of trying a reel (steady there), but I worry hugely about making a mistake (this is a whole other story in itself) and worry about whether I’ll use the wrong word, or use incorrect grammar, or make a spelling error. I worry that folk will think I’m claiming to be someone who has the world all figured out (so far from it) or someone who wants to share all my wisdom so you too can live my perfect life (that needs to be read in an American commercial voice for full effect).

It’s so easy to see a tiny snapshot of someone’s world and make all sorts of assumptions. It happens all the time. We can try so hard not to judge others, but it’s part of our human condition. We make judgements every day about every thing. They’re mostly there to protect and support us, but they can be hugely damaging too if we don’t realise we are doing it.

This fear of being judged and misunderstood feels fairly understandable to me... who doesn’t want to feel that they’re liked and that they’re making some sense, in my mind it comes back to wanting a sense of community and belonging. The fear is there to protect me, as I’m trying hard to believe most fears are. Quick tiny tangent – learning to hear the fears as protective friends, rather than fighting against them like enemies, is proving to be a helpful learning curve for me at the moment. I’m fairly certain this came from a fab book called “Playing Big” by Tara Mohr that I started reading some time ago but have yet to finish!

I’m not sure what the conclusion to all of this is, and I definitely haven’t answered the question about how to have a healthy relationship with social media! I do think I need to keep trying, showing up and learning though. The people I follow on social media and enjoy the most are those who appear to be the most comfortable with not taking themselves too seriously, and those who appear to offer something real, unfiltered and supportive. I love the pages that are reaching out to share their expertise and their passion, the ones that make me feel less alone. And that’s what I have to keep focusing on - putting ourselves out there, sharing our worries and our fears, and our experiences (good, bad and hideous), this is all helping us to reach the people that are searching for the something that we might just be able to support them with. Sometimes we just have to keep trying the hard things and feeling a bit uncomfortable (thank you Glennon).

As expected, this escalated. I hope your tea is still warm at least! I’ll finish up by saying that I definitely don’t have any of the answers... yet! I’m still hopeful they’ll arrive soon as I’ll be forty in October and I really do feel like I should be promoted to a full grown-up by then, right?! If you see me posting awful cheesy pictures or reels that terrify you and make you never want to visit us again, please do feed it back to me. Equally if you want to see more pictures of something specific, or different content, or you have thoughts on what might work well to help us to reach those we most want to support (i.e. everyone that needs it), please do get in touch. Maybe you’ve even done a social media course and it wasn’t icky – please tell me, because I’m totally open to trying it!

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Thanks for reading lovely humans!

Lottie x

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