Bye bye facebook

Dear readers and sponsors,

I have gotten to the point where I need to remove myself from the social media scene. I am borrowing an idea from a friend of mine and I am going to ask my husband to change my facebook password for awhile so that I can no longer get on it as often. I am not worried so much about how much time I spend on it, which isn't all that much, but I worry about how I am starting to feel after spending time on facebook.

When I first had my daughter I was absolutely overcome with happy feelings with her birth. It was fantastic. I felt so empowered. I was impressed with myself for accomplishing what I did. I had such love and appreciation for my body for the first time in my life for the work it was able to do in growing and birthing my baby. I felt beautiful. Stretch marks, saggy skin and excess weight didn't stop me from feeling beautiful. I was on top of the world.

After the celebration stage started to die down and my husband returned to work, I started to feel a little isolated and lonely. Because my husband is a teacher and our baby was born right at the end of the school year, we had a good two months together as a new family. It was wonderful! Even so, after two months I still had a very needy baby. I spent most of my time cuddled with her nursing. I needed something to do while nursing that I could do in short spurts. In comes the iPhone and facebook groups to the rescue. I started joining birth and parenting pages. It was wonderful to be able to spend time with people who were like me, even if it wasn't face to face. Women were supporting one another and helping new moms like me with all the questions they had with pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding.

Then something started to change. The drama started to happen. The moderator of one of my favorite birth pages was very good about deleting the drama and rudeness before I ever had a chance to see it, but it couldn't last forever. At some point I was bound to see it. I could handle it at first because it wasn't directed at me or anyone like me. Then I started noticing that people were talking about people JUST like me with contempt, disgust and disrespect. That really started to hurt my feelings. I started to doubt my accomplishments and I started to doubt my ability to be a good mom to my baby. I started to doubt my self-worth.

I am a very sensitive person. I have always been that way and I have a feeling, no matter how hard I try to thicken my skin, I will just be this way. In order to preserve my sanity and self-worth I need to remove myself from the situation that is making me feel like this. I love to be around people and when I can't, facebook seems to fill a void. But facebook has become a problem. I would go so far as to say I have become addicted to facebook, and that just won't do. Though being addicted to something silly like facebook seems relatively harmless, I have never allowed ANYTHING or ANYONE to remain in my life that made me start to doubt my self-worth. Because, you see, I have very high self-worth. I know who I am and I have too much respect for myself to allow this to continue. I have always struggled with self-esteem. I lack confidence in things I try. I worry that I won't do a good job. I need lots of encouragement. But I won't allow anyone to tamper with my self-worth.

So I am going to take a break from facebook. I NEED to take a break from facebook. I really want to say thank you to my sponsors who took a chance on me as I was trying to enter the world of product reviews/giveaways. I've had such a great time doing that, but I need to find other things to do that require me to be away from the computer, iPhone and especially facebook. I'll still be around, but nowhere near as much. I'll still give shoutouts when I get the chance, but you've probably noticed that I am nowhere near as good at this whole endeavor as I hoped I would be. It's hard! I had no idea what hard work it would be, so I really and truly thank you for being willing to take a chance on a newbie like me. Wish me luck!

Thanks,

Kristi