I deactivated my facebook account last year because they refused to remove a video of kitten being put in a bucket, doused in petrol and lit on fire. I wish I could say I deleted it but considering the fact you have to put in a legal request for an account to be deleted when someone dies, I think I did ok. I still have instagram though, which is owned by facebook and makes me a hypocritical bitch. I just love the way the filters make my cats look and nothing is being set alight.

I didn't really think anything of it when I did delete it - I put up a status announcing that I wouldn't be available on there anymore, which probably sounds very self-indulgent and self-important but it was just to let people know my contact details so that I wouldn't fall out of contact with people. I did still fall out of contact with people but that's neither here nor there. I thought I'd miss it more, but I really didn't. A few days of going to open the app on my phone due to force of habit were about it - after that it just wasn't a part of my life anymore.

I now realise just how venomous a website like facebook could be. I've had a pretty exciting life and there are a lot of good things about it, but when I had facebook I would sit and troll through every page of people I went to high school and university with and see that they were doing nothing but amazing things. Travelling, becoming self-employed, getting promotions, experiencing things that almost everyone has on their bucket list and they were the same age as me and here I was living with my parents and working at a sixth form college in a job that I kinda hated and why couldn't I be as amazing as them?

The problem with social media accounts like facebook and also instagram is that they trivialise what would usually be huge, life changing moments and make them appear to be regular, daily activities. When you see regular people regularly achieving great feats of life your life seems terrible in comparison, which of course it would! If your old maths buddy had started travelling around the world and posted on facebook that they're going to be waking up at 05:45am tomorrow morning and making their way to Japan and you know you've got to get up tomorrow at 05:45am so you can catch the bus to go to work in Lowestoft because you don't have enough money to learn how to drive and buy a car? Your life is going to seem shitty. Even if it's not! But when you see life changing occasions regularly and the people experiencing them act as if it's just another day at the office, it's foolish to think you won't automatically make comparisons to your own life that are so detrimental in the long term. I know I did, constantly. And it often made me unhappy when actually my position in life was pretty great. I realise that now, of course but it took me a long, long time.

I stopped following a lot of people on instagram once I'd had this mini-epiphany. I only follow close friends and family and some tattoo artists whose work I drool over on the reg and I'm much happier for it. I suppose I should get rid of it really, but I just really love showing off my cats, they're so badass and beautiful. My boyfriend recently said that I miss out on a lot because I don't have facebook, which I think about sometimes. Mostly though I just don't see the point of it now.

Five years ago I was Twenty Years Old. I was in my second year of university, had an amazing group of very close friends around me, including someone who was more like a soul mate than anything else, but more about her later. I had a knack for falling for very poisonous men and I had no real direction BUT 100% believed that I would be living in London once I graduated and I would achieve whatever I wanted to and that I would do it within the next 5 years AND it would definitely be something to do with writing, either film or TV or maybe even a novel.

Now it's 2015. I'm Twenty Five years old with a very small group of friends, most of whom are family members and my soulmate dumped me via a facebook message about growth and some other bullshit that I'm obviously not bitter about and don't think about a lot*. I lost a lot of close friendships because I deleted my facebook account, which I still can't decide whether or not that's on them because it's a website and there are literal thousands of different ways to communicate with people or me because I refuse to reactivate my facebook account and there are literally billions of people who use it now. I tripped over a couple of other bad guys before falling in love with a great one and he is truly wonderful, albeit 5 years younger than me. And I live back home with my parents in East Anglia, working in customer services for a local bus company and listening to elderly women tell me I can shove my bus where the sun doesn't shine. 

There are so many aspects of my personality I've lost over the last 5 years. My sociability, my wonder at any and every thing and i think to some extent my spark. Back in Summer of 2013 I was diagnosed with Anxiety and Depression, which is something I still haven't overcome. I like to think that it's just a chemical imbalance that's caused it but I think it's more likely a result of actual events that have occurred in my life than a mistake on nature's part. It's much easier to blame chemicals than it is to face up to the fact that I've become a far more muted and disappointing version of myself and that a lot of shitty things have happened to me. I take medication for my anxiety and depression every day. It's not too bad, although when I forget to take it I get really sick and end up with a migraine. I feel pretty dependent on my medication now, too, and often like it's not enough anymore. But again, this is all a work in progress. Rome wasn't built in a day and my life's fuck-ups can't be wished away.

I'm quite on board with who I am now, as a person, and the friends I've made in the last two years like me exactly as I am now. The only people who have a problem with who I am now are the people who've known me before.I kinda hate who I was before - sure, I wasn't morbidly overweight and I had a lot more friends, but being me then was exhausting. Everything was so calculated and considered, my life was a TV show for people to watch and I just hoped they'd tune back in for the next series. I made a lot of bad and stupid choices and I think back now at how I used to be and cringe. It still hurts though when people say 'What happened to you? you used to be so happy all the time!'. I don't have the energy to repeat over and over again that actually I wasn't that happy at all and who I am now is more me than I've ever been. I still wonder at stupid things - I just don't feel the need to tell everyone so that they'll think of me as some hyped up manic-pixie dream girl figure that I once aspired to be. I enjoy a lot more things for myself rather than for the attention of other people, like I used to. 

I'm not really sure what this post is about, really. It just feels nice to write some honest things for once. 

*Except I do, because she was my best friend and knew everything single thing about me there was to know and she dropped me so suddenly it hit me like a goddamn fire truck, I mean really, as I was reading the message she sent me explaining why being my friend was bad for her, as I was reading the words of someone I loved and thought would be there with me my entire life explain why being my friend was like a poison to her and exhausting to continue it felt like someone had found one of those really old railway sleepers and swung it into my face.