Guilt after leaving facebook friends

[Sephiroth999]

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Back when I used Facebook heavily I found myself extending my ability to helping those "friends" which much more than half seemed to suffer from severe mental illness. I can't pinpoint if they first were unhappy and isolated or whether the site was making them unhappy. My guess would be perhaps both.

I love this board. I love the great minds, the interaction, fun/helpful topics and very ironically the sanity compared to those people. I simply became overextended and exhausted accommodating their delusional situation which the platform I feel just amplified their problems. I was the monkey in the middle.

Some of them, more so the women then the men I was persuasive enough to get them on the phone. I would often bring up how I thought the site served no purpose for me at this stage of development in my life and that I wanted these friends on my phone and/or IRL rather than a less private place such as Facebook. ...I can't get out of my head the sad and downtrodden "but we will miss you!" conversations on the phone. One very younger girl even had a breakdown when during a video chat I told her "I am probably not always going to have a Facebook". She started weeping, the conversation faded. Then the next day all of a sudden she said "I am no longer attracted to you." to my indifference and very slight confusion. ...She would keep pictures of me on her computer background and even to an extent actually revolve her "wall" or "profile" or whatever to revolve around me. Others with severe social anxiety would just feel afraid and agitated when I mentioned my detached feeling about using the site so much and my growing dislike for it.  If they would truly miss me would they not make an effort to put at least 50% of the relationship into the real world??? If not in real life, then perhaps at the very least calling and/or texting? They simply wanted very uncomfortable and impossible relationships (of course revolving around Facebook). I am sensing there was also a lot of gossip about me as some were even admitting to it. When the rug got ripped out from under them they would lose it and proclaim to all of the women on my "friends list" that I was "cheating on all of them". How can you cheat on somebody that you are only communicating by text? I never did "sexting" or anything similar. I remember getting very agitated when a younger girl said "are you sure these women are just not some troll messing with you?" and I had to explain to her that we video chatted enough and talked enough to confirm indeed that they were who they said they were during text. A frequent knee jerk reaction from the males was "it's probably a bot"... zero of them were bots.

This is actually very sad, especially in retrospect but several of them would (for I have no freeking clue why they would resort to this) would overdose on pills often during a text and it even happened during a phone conversation. I have even less of a clue of why they would blame me from the hospital for them overdosing on pills.

I built up a sense of responsibility for these peoples sanity which seemed to get increasingly worse. I feel a combination of guilt, agitation and anxiety about leaving the site. I never was one of those people that would use it all day (perhaps 1-2 hours a day maximum) but many of them literally would stare at the screen all day or have their phone be basically an extension of their own bodies (like an extra limb).

I'll stop there. I would love any kind of opinion about this situation especially if you can draw a parallel similar to my experience (social media felt plastic and toxic so you left).

Thanks for listening.

Edited February 11, 2020 by Sephiroth999

[wookie]

On 2/11/2020 at 11:28 AM, Sephiroth999 said:

  If they would truly miss me would they not make an effort to put at least 50% of the relationship into the real world??? If not in real life, then perhaps at the very least calling and/or texting? They simply wanted very uncomfortable and impossible relationships (of course revolving around Facebook).

This sums up my sentiment of Facebook.  You're not actually connected to people.  Some family show they care.  My old friends as well.

But no one can tell what my inner experiences are.  Maybe I post the odd humourous or political article.  Some of my friends think fb literally steals your soul and when we go out we tell people not to post our images.

Some of my friends on fb come across like assholes and I've lost friends because of fb.

I tried reaching out to someone in my past and the only answer I got were two email hacks.  Blocking me would have given me a kinder answer.  Not even sure if it was them but I just know it was from a town they had a business in or had lived in at one point.

For a while I had a catfish who seemed to really want to get a hold of me across multiple accounts.  They seemed to be connected to multiple women's accounts.  Seemed to rip off pictures of men as their identity, but had a painfully obvious MO and manner of speaking that you could out in 2 seconds.

I just thought, fuck it,  if people actually care they can speak to me by calling me and hanging out with me.

Edited March 17, 2020 by wookie