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Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

social media

Filled with the Fullness of Your Own Everyday, Ordinary Life

April 5, 2019 By Michelle

A few days ago, as Josie lingered with her snout deep in the weeds – “reading the newspaper,” as a fellow dog-walker once observed – I watched a girl on roller skates sidestep, arms outstretched, down a grassy slope. She wore old-fashioned skates, the kind with four wheels and a rubber stopper like a nose on the end of each boot. Suddenly I was back under a rainbow of disco lights at Interskate 91, Beat It pulsing, skates thumping over the hardwood floor.

Nearby a young man had slung a striped hammock between two white pines. His backpack resting at the base of one tree, bike propped against the trunk of the other, he stood tilting his phone this way and that, angling for the perfect shot, patient as the hammock twirled like a double-dutch jump rope in the early spring breeze.

Making our way through the neighborhood, I caught the almost-familiar scent of something spicy – cumin or maybe curry — wafting through the open window of a basement apartment. The food smelled nearly but not quite like the dishes our Yazidi friends prepare for us when we visit.

Two doors down a new scent, the nostalgic smell of hot dogs on the grill, whisking me back to Fourth of July cookouts on the backyard picnic table. Josie smelled it too, stopping to lift her quivering nose in the air.

Tipping my head back to gaze up at an enormous sycamore, I saw that its bare branches were hung with hundreds of seed balls dangling like Christmas ornaments. I picked one up from the ground and carried it like a cherry on a stem, gently so as not to crush it. When I got home from our walk I put the seed ball on a dish and placed it on my desk.

I’m halfway through my Lenten social media fast. After a month away from Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, I feel grounded. My body is grounded. My senses are grounded. My brain is even somehow more grounded. I hadn’t been aware of it until I dialed back the constant noise and distraction, but my thoughts had begun to feel like untethered balloons bumping along with the current, strings dangling.

Being grounded in my own body, in my own environment, in my actual real life, rather than constantly peering into other lives as they are presented on my cell phone screen, has given rise to a keen attentiveness. I notice the girl on the old-fashioned roller skates, the scents whispering through my neighborhood, the regal, whimsical Dr. Seussian sycamore tree.

I see that though it’s April, the magnolia buds are still tightly closed, fuzzed sepals clasping drowsing petals. Even spring’s overachievers, the daffodils, are biding their time, keeping their sunny yellow encased in their papery wraps. Everywhere there is something new and fresh and beautiful to see, to hear, to smell, to touch. Everywhere there is a sense of expectancy.

My life has a different kind of fullness these days – different from the bloated, pants-too-tight-after-a-big-meal fullness created by noise, distraction, input, information, images. Different from the full-of-emptiness one can sometimes feel from ingesting too much of other people’s lives as they are presented online.

These days I am grounded. I am full. Filled with ordinary sights, sounds and smells. Filled with the fullness of my own everyday, ordinary life.

Filed Under: slow, small moments, social media Tagged With: social media fast

5 Things I Learned from My Six-Week Social Media Fast

May 3, 2017 By Michelle

I hadn’t “given up” anything for Lent in years, but when my pastor asked on Ash Wednesday, “What’s keeping you from growing in your relationship with God?” I knew social media was my answer.

Now that Lent is over and Easter has come and gone, I’m back on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, this time, I hope, a wiser, more discerning user. I can tell you straight up: the fast made a difference. I spend a lot less time on social media than I used to, and I’m much less inclined to pick up my phone when I have a few minutes of downtime.

Here are five things I learned from my fast.

Social media can be addicting.
I’d read the scientific research about the connection between social media and the release of the feel-good brain chemical dopamine, but I’d always assumed I was somehow immune…until, that is, I gave up social media and found myself picking up my phone two dozen times a day. It was almost like I’d trained my brain and my body to need to have my phone in my hand.

I was surprised by how long it took to break the addiction; more than two weeks passed before the urge to reach for my phone finally began to diminish.

Social media is distracting.
Turns out, there was a pattern to my social media habits. I typically scrolled Facebook or Twitter and then, when I glimpsed a headline that piqued my interest, I clicked over to the site. I rarely read an article from start to finish, but instead quickly skimmed the content before clicking over to something else, repeating this process a half-dozen times before finally clicking off the Internet altogether.

The cycle left me feeling fragmented, rushed, distracted, and vaguely anxious. Stepping away from social media allowed me to identify this pattern and see the harm it was causing my mental and spiritual well-being.

Social media impacts our ability to think critically.
My social media fast helped me see that my critical thinking skills had grown rusty. Instead of forming an educated opinion of my own, more often I simply regurgitated the opinions and arguments of others. Away from Facebook and Twitter, I was better able to ask myself, “What do YOU think about that?” and figure out my own answer.

Social media blunts our sensory perception.
Two days after Ash Wednesday I sat in my front yard, eyes closed, faced tipped toward the early spring sun, and listened to the birds. The longer I listened, the better I was able to identify distinct calls from the cacophony of chirps and cackles. I realized then that it had been a long time since I’d heard the birds. Without my nose in an app, I was more present to the nuanced beauty of God’s creation.

Social media is not the spawn of Satan.
I missed my long-distance friends during my six-week fast, the people with whom I’ve formed real relationships across the cyber waves. I missed the random pictures of sunsets and beach vacations and birthday celebrations. I missed the conversations, the curious musings, the bits of goodness scattered here and there.

My fast helped me see where my social media habits cross the line into unhealthy behavior, but it also reminded me that I needn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Although it was challenging for the first few weeks, my Lenten social media fast turned out to be an enlightening and fruitful experience. And while I’m mostly glad to be back in the world of hashtags and emoji, I have a clearer understanding of why it’s better for my spiritual and mental health if social media is enjoyed in moderation.

An edited version of this post was first published in the April 29 edition of the Lincoln Journal Star.

Filed Under: Lent, social media Tagged With: social media fast

My Reaction to the Facebook Reactions {or…Use Your Words, People!}

February 25, 2016 By Michelle

get-facebook-reactions-anywhere

So in case you missed it, yesterday Facebook exploded in celebratory glee over the introduction of its new emoticons, otherwise known as “Reactions,” according to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. No longer do we need to feel limited by the lowly “Like” button; we now have a heart Love button, a haha Laughter button, a yay Happy button {by the way, the Yay button is only available in Spain and Ireland right now…because apparently the Spanish and Irish are a lot Yayier than the rest of us}, a surprised Wow button, a frowny Sad button and a beady-eyed Angry button.

Ever the late adopter, I posted my own reaction to the Reactions on my Facebook page:

“Am I the only one who doesn’t love the new Facebook emoticons? I have 58 toothpastes to choose from, 148 kinds of deodorant, 9,000 kinds of cereal, 14,000 television stations, and now I have 6 Facebook faces, too. It’s too much! My brain is melting! Choice overload! How about we just go back to “Like” or move on? My head is going to pop off the first time someone gives me the angry face on a status update (go ahead, try it – who is going to be the first?!) ‪#‎curmudgeonly‬ (where’s the face for that, eh?)”

Plus, there’s the fact that I know myself. I already take note of the “Likes” on my posts (oh come on, get over it, you know you do, too). I can see how this is all going to go down…

“Huh. Only four Loves. Why only four Loves? Why 47 Likes but only four Loves? Why am I worthy of Like but not Love?! For the love, where is the LOVE?!”

Or… “Hey, she gave me the Angry Beady Eyes. What did I ever do to her? What did I do to deserve the Angry Beady Eyes? Yeah? Yeah? Fine. Angry Beady Eye right back at you, babe.”

I mean seriously, I’m already a navel gazer. These six new emoticons are only going to plunge me into a whole new level of navel-gazing, and it ain’t gonna be pretty.

I was mostly joking last night when I posted that status update about the new emoticons, until later, that is, when suddenly I wasn’t.

You see, I got to thinking about when I was in college. I wrote in long-hand (what, pray tell, is long hand?) to my nana and to my nana’s sister, my great aunt Mary, at least once a month – on my very own monogrammed stationery, no less. And I received letters from them in return. I still remember crouching down to open the tiny metal door of my dorm post office box and spotting the telltale dusty pink envelope, knowing my grandmother’s notepaper, with a rosebud at the top, just above the delicate script, From the Desk of Elizabeth DeRusha, was folded inside. I didn’t keep any of those letters (I got the Anti-Sentimental Gene from my dad), but I still remember how much I cherished receiving them at the time.

Now, I may sound like I am 1,009 years old for saying this, but for heaven’s sake, what have we come to with these Facebook emoticons?  Your coworker posts a sentimental note on Facebook about the death of her grandfather, and you click Frowny Sad Face and move on. Your sister posts a selfie of her new haircut, you click the heart. Finito. Your BFF posts about her terrible, awful, no good, very bad day, and you click Beady Angry Eyes to signify “Grrrrr, those are the worst.” Or do you click Frowny Sad Face to demonstrate empathy? Or do you click both for good measure?

Click. Done. Scroll on. Click. Done. Scroll on.

Facebook’s new “Reactions” simply give us another excuse and another way to skate through life on vapid autopilot. They let us off the hook by allowing us to pretend we are expressing heartfelt emotion – joy, sorrow, empathy, compassion, anger– when in fact, all we’re really doing is taking the easy way out. We’re not connecting, were clicking. And clicking. And clicking. And clicking.

Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg had to say about the Reactions launch on his own Facebook timeline yesterday (by the way, did you know that Mark Zuckerberg has 52,254,708 followers? For reals. It’s practically a ticker tape!) :

“Not every moment you want to share is happy. Sometimes you want to share something sad or frustrating. Our community has been asking for a dislike button for years, but not because people want to tell friends they don’t like their posts [ahem, clearly Mark hasn’t visited the Christian Facebook community lately]. People wanted to express empathy and make it comfortable to share a wider range of emotion. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the right way to do this with our team. One of my goals was to make it as simple as pressing and holding the Like button. The result is Reactions, which allow you to express love, laughter, surprise, sadness or anger.”

I hear what you’re saying, Mark, I really do. People do want to express a broader range of emotions beyond the bland, pallid “Like.” People do want to express joy, sorrow, disappointment, empathy, compassion and anger, in real life and on Facebook. People do want to react. But there is an effective, meaningful way to do this, and it doesn’t entail simply “pressing and holding” a button.

It’s called using our words. Our powerful, eloquent, insightful, angry, sorrowful, poignant, beautiful, celebratory, life-giving words.

Words are still important, even in this Brave New World of emoticons and Reactions – especially in this Brave New World of emoticons and Reactions. In spite of what Mark Zuckerberg says about “making it comfortable” to share emotion, the truth is, sometimes emotion is uncomfortable. Grief is uncomfortable. Anger is uncomfortable. Sorrow and loneliness are uncomfortable. What we need is to learn how to sit with and in this discomfort. Words, though not always perfect, allow us to do that in a way that robotically clicking a cartoony “Reaction” never will.

Words have the power to move us to tears. Words have the power to make the hair on our arms and the back of our necks stand on end. Words have the power to make us dance, shout, curse, and cheer. Words have the power to start a movement. Words have the power to change us. Words have the power to change the world.

Words give us life and breath and love. Words are Life and Breath and Love. 

God gave us words because they have the power to connect us — to help us see and hear, to know and understand one another. Words, plain and simple, are a gift.

So maybe the next time we go to click one of those emoticon faces, we can take a second to pause and remember that. Let’s remember that words are a gift we can give and receive…even on Facebook, even in this Brave New World.

{and yeah, when I post this on Facebook, you all better give me a whole lot of those hearts}

Filed Under: social media Tagged With: Facebook Reactions, pitfalls of social media, writing

2016: A Year of Stopping

January 12, 2016 By Michelle

one perfect snowflake

I saw the first snowflake fall a few minutes ago. Well, not the first snowflake ever, obviously. And probably not even the first snowflake to fall in my backyard today. But it was the first snowflake as far as I could see. It fell from the sky like a crumb of angel food cake. I didn’t recognize what it was at first. Only when I saw another and then another did I realize it had begun to snow, lightly, and silent like mist.

It’s rare for me to sit at my desk and gaze out the window. My “office” is in our sunroom; my desk is surrounded on three sides by floor-to-ceiling windows that open to the garden and the backyard. But I don’t spend much time actually looking. I’m too “busy” to waste that kind of time.

I typically start my work day with a quick peruse through Facebook and Twitter. I “like” a few status updates, comment here and there, click over to skim a blog post or an article, retweet a couple of things, post links to my own blog posts, if I have anything new. Once I finally get down to the business of my real work for the day, I’m usually pretty focused. Sometimes I even forget to pause for a bathroom break and find myself squirming uncomfortably in my chair.

But. When I do hit a block – grappling for the right word, frustrated with a clunky transition, unsure which direction to go or what I even want to say next – I click over to social media. I scan and scroll and click and retweet, and when I finally make it back to my own piece — the piece I’d abandoned when I hit the wall — I discover I’m just as stuck and frustrated as ever. I haven’t given my brain a chance to reset or rest or meander in a fruitful way, but instead, have filled it with noise and distraction.

One of my New Year’s resolutions this year is to make my work time more productive by pausing in a way that’s beneficial to the creative process. In other words, to “resist absentminded busyness” as Maria Popova says, paraphrasing Søren Kierkegaard. This means no quick email checks; no popping over to Facebook or Twitter; no Instagram scrolling; no blog post reading. I won’t begin my work day that way, and I won’t interrupt it that way when I get stuck. I’m sure this is not a revelation for you, but I’m finally beginning to understand that social media is detrimental to my creativity and my productivity as a writer.

Instead, I resolve to look out the window. Or use the bathroom. Or switch out a load of laundry. Or make a cup of tea. Or walk to the mailbox to slip an envelope inside and raise the flag. I resolve to do something that rests my brain so that when I return to the page (screen), my mind isn’t pinging with noise and distraction, but instead is open, quiet and refreshed.

I actually made three New Year’s resolutions this year — I love to make resolutions, you know (it’s keeping them that’s the problem…just ask me about flossing) — and each of them has something to do with stopping (I’ll talk a little more about the other two later this week and next).

On Sunday I listened to a new-to-me podcast called “This Good Word” with author Steve Wiens. The episode was entitled “Stop,” and in it, Wiens urged his listeners to “let 2016 start with stopping.”

I love that. It can be applied to so many facets of life, and in the episode, Wiens asks some great questions aimed at helping us think about how we can stop more in our daily lives. By the time I listened to “This Good Word” during my afternoon run on Sunday, I’d already made my stopping-related resolutions, but the ways Wiens talked about stopping helped to clarify what I’d been pondering since January 1.

It’s snowing harder now as I write this, thick flakes falling languidly, leisurely, straight down from the sky. They seem to be taking their time traveling from the heavens to the ground, not bent so much on arriving, but on the process of getting here instead.

I think I’ll watch them for a little while longer before moving onto my next project. It seems these snowflakes might have something important to say.

 

Filed Under: quiet, social media, writing Tagged With: quiet, Stopping, the writing life

Social Media Doesn’t Define You {No Matter How Pretty the Word Pictures Are}

November 19, 2015 By Michelle

Yesterday I did one of those gimmicky Facebook games – I am such a sucker for gimmicky Facebook games. This one promised to create a picture comprised of the words I use most often in my Facebook posts. Cool, I thought, sign me up!

So here are my results:

Screenshot 2015-11-18 18.58.09

I didn’t think too much of it at first. I was pleased God got in there…that seemed important for a “Christian writer.” I did, however, find it a little frightening that He was competing neck and neck with “book” and “blog.” That didn’t seem quite right.

Brad made a cameo appearance in the bottom right corner – yay, Brad! — but Luther got equal billing. Freud would have a field day with that.

Overall, it could have been worse. I was a little worried that “suckbag” or “wine” was going to end up front and center on my word picture.

I was mildly entertained by the game. Until, that is, I began to see other people’s word pictures splattered all over Facebook.

My friend Lelia’s featured the word “God” so big it looked like a billboard. I mean, GOD was practically her only word!

Another friend’s looked like she had cherry-picked All The Best Words for her picture, which was squeezed to overflowing with descriptors like “love,” “family,” “joy,” “connection,” “Jesus,” “God,” “believe” and “grateful.” Was she reading the Beatitudes every day prior to posting on Facebook?

Another friend’s was all lighthearted and fun: “birthday,” “family,” “love,” “heart,” “music,” “Christmas.” Clearly she was reading a little too much Mary Engelbriet.

I clicked back to my picture, which suddenly looked a little sparse. This was the best I could do? These were my most-used words? “Girls,” “now,” “look,” “go,” “little,” “like”…What am I, a third grader?

I looked more closely and noticed something else. My words leaned heavily toward the self-absorbed.

“I’ve”

“I’m”

“I’d”

“Need”

“Want”

Perfect.

I clicked back to my main feed and looked at some more of my friends’ and acquaintances’ word pictures:

“Love,” “people,” “good!”

“Hope,” “living,” “amazing,” “giving!”

“Happy,” “friends,” “best!”

Good grief! I have the worst words! I have the most juvenile, self-involved, self-absorbed, narcissistic words! I am a narcissist! Facebook has proved it!

There I was, my finger poised to delete my stupid Most Used Words on Facebook post from my timeline, full of shame and humiliation that my words weren’t fancy enough or Christian enough or love-thy-neighbor enough, when I stopped in my tracks.

This, my friends, is the insidious nature of social media. It fuels comparison. A click here, a click there, and before we even realize it, we’re assuming that everyone else has a prettier, more organized, more neighborly, more loving, more holy life. Social media paints a false picture of reality, and as a result, it tricks us, leaving us feeling empty, less-than and ashamed, like we don’t measure up and clearly never will.

Friends, what you post on Facebook or tweet on Twitter or pin on Pinterest or Scope on Periscope is not you. It may be a sliver of you. It may offer us a few insights into who you are and what you believe in and what you value and what you are thinking in that given moment on that given day, but it’s not a full picture of the flesh and blood unique and beautiful you that God made.

Not. Even. Close.

I almost believed it for a minute there. I almost believed that Facebook could define me based on the words I’ve used most in status updates over the past however-many-months. I almost believed that Facebook could define me period.

Luckily I remembered, at the very last second, that it’s how I live my life offline, not what I choose to post about it on social media, that defines who I am.

By the way, I tried to convince Brad to do the Most Used Words on Facebook. He refused. I think he was secretly afraid it would look like this:

Moby Dick

Filed Under: social media Tagged With: pitfalls of social media

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a Triple Type A, “make it happen” (my dad’s favorite mantra) striver and achiever (I’m a 3 on the Enneagram, which tells you everything you need to know), but these days my striving looks more like sitting in silence on a park bench, my dog at my feet, as I slowly learn to let go of the false selves that have formed my identity for decades and lean toward uncovering who God created me to be.

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