Facebook Downers

In my last post I talked about how I love to find inspirational RA sufferers to connect with. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees with my philosophy that motivation from others will help you cope better. I found that out the hard way. Shortly after my diagnosis, I had this crazy idea that I could find myself a decent support group via Facebook that would help me cope with the early and extremely painful stages of RA while the medication was still trying to kick in and I was extremely depressed by my sudden diagnosis. Wrong. Stupid, in fact. There are a lot of people who don't want help or motivation want to spread their negativity like a virus and use Facebook to to accomplish this scheme.

I joined a group (that shall be left nameless) that offered some pretty helpful tips and tricks for everyday life and posted some really amazing quotes and photos to keep people's spirits up. But it was a bipolar experience. The picture or meme or whatever the owner of the page posted would make me feel amazing. Then my gaze would travel downwards, as tends to happen on Facebook, to the comments section, where everyone and their mother would start bashing the original post. The comments ranged from criticizing the page for posting something unrealistic, to people arguing about who was in more pain that day. And God forbid you were a "positive commenter." No positivity allowed there. If you had the guts to post something upbeat, you knew that you were going to be torn apart and accused of not being in enough pain or understanding "the struggle that we go through everyday."

Needless to say, I wound up "unliking" the page in record time. I know it happens more often than not, but don't understand why people feel the need to remain in a cycle of negative thinking. I totally agree that we all need to vent sometimes. It's not healthy to bottle anything up. But repetitive negative thinking and complaining never makes me feel good. I feel completely helpless and hopeless instead. Maybe this makes me an unsympathetic person. Maybe not. I don't think everyone intentionally sets out to make everyone else miserable by pulling them into the chronic illness abyss, but it makes me angry nonetheless. I get cranky from the pain sometimes too, but there's a fine line between reaching out for help and sucking the life out of the next available victim. These are not the people I want to be surrounded by. I want to make the most of my life, not sit in front of a computer thinking about all of the ways to make some person living across the country's life more difficult.