The Usual Complaints + Social Media Rant

Sleep
It usually takes me a while to get to sleep and when I finally do I don't sleep all that well.  It doesn't matter what time I go to bed I'm always tired.  I get through work in a haze of fatigue.  I perk up a bit more at home, but the work days are really long and exhausting.  Weekends are better.  I stay up as late as I want, go to sleep when I am really tired, and wake up whenever I want.  I have to be dead tired to sleep well enough or the time to sleep in as long as I need to in order to feel rested.

Weight
I loose and gain the same 2-3 lbs over and over again depending on whether or not I'm retaining water.  The lowest I've seen since June is 138 and then inevitably I'll be bloated the next day and shoot up a few pounds.  The bloating has no real rhyme or reason half the time.  I know it's happening when I guzzle water on the way to work at 7am and then barely have to pee by the time lunchtime rolls around and then when I do hardly anything comes out.  Not normal.   I was 138.2 yesterday but I knew right away it wouldn't last because I retained most of the water I drank that day.  Then it goes up and up until the bloat goes away and it gradually goes down, only to start the same cycle over again. I'm so over it.

Exercise
I've continued to run/walk on weekends but got lazy with my weekday workouts.  I did my first circuit training workout in almost three weeks on Monday.  Between the time change and it getting dark so early and being so tired, I haven't felt like working out after work.  The other part of it is that nothing I do changes a damn thing about my weight.  I am much less motivated to work out when it feels like a battle I am never going to win anyway.  I will get back into it when I set my mind to it.  I always do.  I will probably get serious again in January when my husband leaves.  I'm not gaining right now and after everything I've put my metabolism through over the years I feel okay about taking it easy.  Maybe my body needs it.   

Social Media
I've decided that social media is really bad for me.  I think I knew this all along, but all the Essenia O'neil drama clarified it.  I am highly impressionable, insecure, prone to depression, hard on myself and have a real problem with comparing myself to others.  This does not mesh well with social media.  And now that blogging has become part of the social media machine I don't even feel good about that anymore.  I'm not talking about this anonymous blog.  I have a different one.  The blog world is so fake and not at all as supportive as it seemed to be before money entered the scene and it became a business.  I guess I get it for businesses.  But people have become businesses and the lines are blurred.  In the blog world it's like you don't exist unless you have thousands of social media followers.  Not everyone is into it, but it's hard not to feel left out.  Blogging used to be just blogging and now you have to sell yourself and I don't have the personality for it.  I write stuff on the internet.  What exactly am I selling?  Why does everyone expect to be famous without actually doing anything of significance?  It never sat well with me to buy add space and give away free stuff left and right just to gain followers.  More followers, means more comments, which gets you in with popular bloggers, which gets you more page views, which gets you free stuff and sponsored posts, which gets you even more followers.  Well, a lot of bloggers were all in for that and I got left behind.  Fine.  Then came social media.  Popular bloggers do well over there too and not so popular bloggers or non bloggers better have something else going for them.  Get yourself on a reality show.  Loose a lot of weight.  Be skinny.  Be really pretty, be fashionable, be talented.  Do something big.  Be a bikini competitor.  Be a teenage all-star World Champion cheerleader.  Go viral.  Have quintuplets.  Travel the world for a living.  Even having a really cute baby can be just the thing.  People looooove babies.  Babies get a lot of likes.  Inspire envy in some way.  Some people get followers without doing a whole lot, but if you are not one of those people you have to do something to get noticed.     

It always comes down to numbers with me.  When it comes to my weight it's never low enough and when it comes to social media it's not high enough.  I allow myself to be negatively influenced by numbers over and over again.  I don't follow too many celebrities on social media because I can't relate to their fabulous lifestyle.  I'm just not that interested in following their lives on Instagram.  I follow gymnasts, dancers, people who work out, and other bloggers because that's what I was interested in.  Well, it's not just celebrities anymore that are being worshiped and envied by the masses.  I have never been the popular girl that gets liked and being on social media shoves it in my face every day.  I know it's not all real or whatever, but seeing 6 pack abs skinny BBG Kalya Itsines wannabes, fashion bloggers, lifestyle bloggers, and other random people who are popular for who knows what with thousands of followers and likes on every picture is just another message to me that I don't measure up.  These are regular people, with regular jobs who are presumably like me and yet they have skyrocketed to internet fame.  The popular people.  This club that I can't ever seen to get into. I don't have the numbers to be liked by them and I am not inspirational enough, skinny enough, pretty enough or savvy enough to get the numbers.  I mean really, would I follow me on Instagram?  I'm biased, so I can't even come close to objectively answering that question but based on my numbers probably not.   Also, when you get right down to it I do think it's kind of stupid and it makes me feel stupid spending too much time on it.  I don't live my life on social media nor do I want to.  I'm torn between knowing how silly it all is and wanting to be part of it.  Nobody cares about what I had for dinner, that I just burned 500 calories on the elliptical, that I put my hair in a bun, that I bought new boots or that I am watching Scandal right?  Why am I blasting this information to the world? Well, that all depends on who you are.  If you have 50,000 followers the meal I had for dinner is everyone's favorite, I am so inspirational and amazing for hitting that calorie burn, my bun looks like a delicious ice cream cone, where did I get my boots because they must also have them, and oh my gosh-Scandal is the best isn't it?  If you have 200 followers.  Crickets. 

I went on a serious unfollowing spree on Instagram and Bloglovin.  I unfollowed accounts that were making me feel bad about myself either because I can't bear to see another post full of fan girls worshiping the ground they walk on or because I'm tired of being snubbed because I don't have a lot of followers.  It's not them, it's me.  So fat.  So jealous.  And it is kind of pathetic, but I have to do what I have to do.  I don't even want to be envied and worshiped.  I just want to be liked, but I didn't even care about any of that until other people started caring about it so much. I didn't care about how many followers I had on my blog until other bloggers started posting how excited they were to hit 500 and talking about the  best way to get followers.  Remember, I'm highly impressionable.  I don't have a problem with Facebook because it is not linked to blogging whatsoever so I don't feel pressure to sell myself or try to be popular.  I am only friends there with people that I have a real life connection to.  Twitter doesn't bother me too much either.  The feed is miles long and it's too much to look at so I rarely do.  Although, they do have this really cool feature to check your tweet activity to see how many people interacted with it and they did just introduce the like button.  More and more ways to measure your social media popularity.   Instagram is the worst for me, and blogging has become something that I enjoy less and less because of the way the community and expectations have changed.  I always did, but I am really doing it for myself now since I don't have a lot of readers and I'm not doing the commercial quit your job to blog thing.  If I can't get anyone to take an interest in me or my blog how would I ever get anyone to read my novel? Marketing is all part of the ballgame and I'm terrible at it.

The root cause of all of this is that I don't like myself enough to not have feelings about all of this at all.  I'm a grown ass woman and I thought the days of feeling insecure about this kind of foolishness were behind me.  The age of social media has likely spawned a whole generation of very young kids like Essenia who truly believe that their worth depends on how popular they are on social media and equate internet likes with love.  People putting so much TMI and so much of themselves out there on the web for likes and attention and they don't even realize that it's odd.  There are toddlers and fetuses (I'm not kidding) with thousands upon thousands of followers on Instagram accounts managed by parents.  I follow a little dancer with a mom who sets up Instagram accounts for each of her kids so that by the time they are born they have at least 10k followers.  It sets a kid up to seek approval and love from strangers on the internet and we are just now starting to see what that does to a child. Thank god I didn't come of age with social media in the mix.  I can only imagine how damaging that would have been to me considering how affected I feel by it as an adult.  That being said.  I am an adult who grew up before all this stuff existed.  I should be better than this.

I'm really curious about what your thoughts are on social media.  I feel like I'm in the twilight zone on this.  Everyone is drinking the cool-aid and I'm a disgruntled hater.  So glad to get all this out.  It makes me realize even more just how stupid it all is and I already feel a little bit better.

I'll talk a bit more about my novel in another post.