Venting on the Internet

I had some time to kill this morning before taking my daughter to school so I logged into Facebook. I went through several posts and noticed that one of my cousins was sharing some quotes on FB quite often. This particular cousin is not on Facebook so much. So I was pleasantly surprised to see so many posts by him. The quotes he shared were good ones and I agreed with many of them.

But then I noticed they seemed to have the same sort of message. This made me stop and wonder if something was up. These suspicions were heightened after I noticed a comment from his mother-in-law to “let it go.” Yes, something was definitely up! Later, I spent some time going through my cousin’s page and found out that something had indeed happened.

And when I realized this, and that he had used these posts as a way of venting, I could only laugh and think, That’s my cousin!

Because I do that, too. If somebody pisses me off on Facebook, I usually post memes or quotes as a way of venting about it. Not too long ago, one of my other cousins decided to be the Facebook police and when she expressed her disapproval over something I shared on MY page, I responded with posting a bunch of quotes along the lines of how it’s MY Facebook page and I’ll share what I want to. I stand by this conviction. (My cousin pretty much saw these posts and promptly unfriended me.) But after I was done with that, I moved on to other things and just let it all go. I am totally over what happened. My cousin can go ahead and take EVERYTHING she sees on Facebook personally but I have moved on because I finished venting about it. (Side note: I have occasionally seen pins on Pinterest echoing these sentiments and I HAVE pinned them because I find them funny and I also agree with them. It’s not because I’m holding a grudge!)

Yes, I know I can talk to people directly rather than posting some meme or some quote. But sometimes, I get too mad at someone, and I DON’T want to talk to them. Posting the meme or the quote is my more innocent and passive way of telling them to fuck off.

Thinking about this, though, with my cousin’s experience and my own experience, I had to marvel over how technology has changed the way we communicate with other people. It’s like “I’m so mad, I’m going to tell you off with a meme!” Or there are other ways people get back at others through the Internet, like with revenge porn.

I try to keep my Facebook page drama-free, but sometimes, I DO need to stand up for myself and let people know that I don’t care for people playing the “Facebook police” with me. I don’t like people posting their hate or judgments on my page – because I ALSO try to keep my page hate-free – but sometimes people think it’s okay to be snarky or expect EVERYONE they know to fit into some old mold they have them shoved into. So sometimes, yeah, we DO need to vent. I’m glad I did because it helped me deal with my anger. (I also privately talked with a sister about it and that helped a lot.) But the next day, I was done with it and moved on. I’m glad my cousin did, because it’s not healthy to bottle things up. And from the looks of it, it seems like he is moving on, too.

When you are on a social media website, you cannot promise to give everybody rainbows and lollipops every single day. Bad things happen. We need to be able to vent and get it all out of our system. The important thing, though, is to finish venting and move on to a new day.