Recently, I deactivated my Facebook account for a few days. I needed a break. I wanted to know what it felt to be Facebook-free. I did it because life has been terribly unhappy and stressed out recently and being on Facebook seemed to be exacerbating the situation. Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is wonderful. It is such an exciting, dynamic place, but the flip side of that is how invasive and intrusive it can become. We end up sharing more of our lives than we intend and we also end up finding out more than we need to know.

Remember how ignorance was bliss? It IS bliss. If there are so many millions of things we as human beings still do not know, I believe it is simply because we are not ready. The unknown exists as the unknown for a reason: it’s for our own good. Until we have the maturity and wisdom to know what to do with all we discover about life & the world, it is better for us to stay unaware. Discovering certain things and then knowing that there is absolutely nothing you can do to address it, change it or impact it; knowing that your presence makes no difference to it makes you feel defeated, devalued and utterly helpless.

I have found out things that, I suppose I needed to know but somehow wish I never had. What I know has emptied my life of meaning and value. I feel the joy drain out of me, and I recognise I am totally impotent in the face of what I see, know and cannot change; and worse still what I know will change on my account either.

I know that life will do what it must; your destiny will not be thwarted by your own fears or inadequacies to cope. Sometimes you are strong enough to brace the blows, but sometimes accidents happen. You don’t see what’s coming for you, or, you don’t know just how badly you will be hit. You become a mere casualty as life makes it way through the landscape of all you have built.

Right now I am trying to gather myself close and stay surrounded by what helps me feel safe. And believe it or not, that doesn’t include a single human being. I feel very alone but the thought of people making small talk about the weather and my job, telling me to ‘get out there, meet people and have fun’, or giving me off-the-shelf pop psychology makes me want to scream.

Sometimes I feel a little insane and sometimes uncharacteristically calm, but what is constant and overwhelming is the quiet, a keen reminder of my sudden isolation. And I don’t think it can be any other way right now. It is time I think, to  work my way out of the wreckage and make something of this experience. It is no longer enough to simply distract myself or escape.

I know ‘this too shall pass’. I know ‘time is a great healer’. I know I have to ‘let go’, ‘move on’… I know. I know all this. I just have to keep calm, stay quiet and wait it out. This too shall pass.