The Argument for More Friends IRL (In Real Life)

I run social media for my magazine, so basically I get paid to run around the internet reading people’s Facebook posts, tweets, news articles and blog posts. Yeah, it’s a sweet gig, but somebody’s gotta do it, right?

Today I found an article titled, “Why Facebook Is More Important Than Your House.” You would think that since I spend the better part of the week on that site, this would delight me. It turns out that around the same time this article was written last winter, I had come across another article, “How Facebook Secretly Ends Your Relationships,” and this one has had me thinking ever since I read it about how much our relationships with others have changed in recent years.

To be clear, I am not bashing social media or Facebook (not today, at least). Although I occasionally suffer from a little SM-overload, I love my job and am constantly amazed at all of the brilliant and informative information that I come across daily.

I will say, though, that since February I’ve looked at social media a lot differently, and it’s changed the way I’ve interacted on my personal accounts. I realized that in some ways I’ve used social media as a replacement for real-life interaction, able to lurk secretly around my friends’ and followers’ activities without having to give anything of myself other than the occasional pithy (in my own mind) remark. It’s made me pull back quite a bit.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter, not to mention blogs, have allowed us to do incredible things: stay in touch with friends and family on the other side of the world, learn about world-changing events as they break, and find like-minded people to connect with that we would have otherwise never met, to name a few.

But I think that these sites have also allowed us to treat many of our connections on autopilot, to make it more about how many “friends” that we have rather than the quality of those friendships. Others have been saying similar things for quite some time, but armed with the added knowledge of just how ingrained in our lives social media becomes, and how it evaluates our unconscious (or is it subconscious?) actions and manipulates our online relationships based on their findings — well, that just makes a person think.

So, am I going to stop using social media? Even excluding the fact that I use it for work, I doubt it. There’s just too much going on to be completely left out of the loop. But I am going to use it more wisely, just like I’ve been trying to do with my television and movie viewing habits. And I’m going to try and repair some of the “IRL” bonds that I’ve let slip as I’ve allowed “life” to get in the way. In the end, it’s the only thing that’s going to make me truly connected — and truly happy.

So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to log off and go call a friend. Doesn’t matter who, as long as I don’t do it online. ;-)

Being New Doesn't Last Forever

It's been a long time since I've done something that either doesn't come intuitively to me or that I haven't been doing for years. So, the last several months at my new job have been very hard for me. As much as I knew that a lot of the mistakes and misunderstandings I was experiencing came from being incredibly new, I've still been spent a lot of my time incredibly frustrated and in fear for my future.

I started in the hair industry 17 years ago this June. After 10 months of cosmetology school, I then had another six months of advanced training that I went through before being placed in a salon to build my own clientele. School wasn't so bad; people expect you to screw up there. Once, I even waxed most of one of my mother's eyebrows off. She eventually forgave me, and the eyebrow eventually grew back.

But the training program after school was tough in the beginning. Even though I knew I needed more training, I was so sure that I was such a hot-shit hairdresser from school that for a while all the additional training did was teach me how much I didn't know. I remember the first time I highlighted somebody's hair after learning the "right" way to do it. A procedure that had before taken me 40 minutes to perform took three hours. Halfway through the service, I walked into the back room, threw my hands up and proclaimed that I was tired and done. My manager didn't even bother to look at me as she told me to get my ass back out there and finish up what I was doing.

And there was the (first) time that I turned a client's hair orange while trying to get it blonde. She, proud new owner of pumpkin orange hair, sat there and told me everything would be all right as I cried hysterically. (Oddly enough, I had an eerily similar situation the first time, as a manager, that I had to fire someone.) And still, somehow I managed to become a pretty decent hair colorist over the years, if I do say so myself.

Even though I replayed these and many, many other similar situations in my head, over these last few months every time I've seen my writing heavily edited or somebody points out an error that I've failed to catch, I have beaten myself up over the inability to learn my job instantly. I even went through a tough couple of weeks of sleeping issues because I was so sure that I was going to get fired at any time.

A couple of weeks ago, my team supervisor gave me a really nice compliment based on a conversation she'd had with our managing editor. She told me how they felt I had risen to the occasion during a complicated and hectic time. (Due to unexpected events, I transitioned into my job with minimal supervision.)

That was a conversation that came at exactly the right time and, for some reason, finally made me objectively evaluate how I've been doing. And, you know what? It's not so bad. Even just the difference between how I launched the last issue of the magazine compared to the first issue I launched right before Christmas — well, it's night and day. For one, last month I didn't set my alarm for 4 a.m. to make sure that I hadn't screwed up the whole process. And the mistakes that I was making even in February — I'm not making them today.

So, am I saying that I've got my job down to an art and it's time to move onto something else? Not even in my dreams. But I'm making different mistakes now, having learned from past ones, and every one that I make helps me learn a new skill a little bit better. And I know that every day I'll feel more comfortable with what I do and my ability to do it. I've been telling myself this all along, but now, finally, I actually believe it, and I'm able to sit back and enjoy the process. Somewhat.

(Update: The morning after writing the first draft of this post, I made a totally dumbass but (thankfully!) correctable mistake at work. So, yeah, I've still got a long way to go before doing things with my eyes closed. But it still feels better than it used to!)