NEDA recently published my Story of hope, entitled A Mom’s Journey from Denial to Advocacy It may look familiar – as it was originally published in this blog.
As a self-proclaimed advocate, I am attempting to leverage social media, with mixed results. I created a Twitter account, and now I don’t know what to do with the damn thing. Ditto Instagram. I once asked a friend: ; “Do you Tweet?”, to which he replied “Only when pinched”. Apparently, I need to be pinched.
My initial foray into FB years ago resulted in a nasty encounter with a cyber-stalker. As I setup my FB account, I innocently proceeded to ‘friend’ people from my Google contact list–including some that I really didn’t know all that well, but had exchanged emails with at some point in time. This category included a former co-worker whom I will call Tom (largely because I don’t remember his actual name). Most people accepted my friend invitation and I started to explore the then-fledgling world of Facebook.
The NEXT DAY I received a series of vile FB messages from a woman who was Tom’s girlfriend. How DARE I friend her man??? How Inappropriate — How Scheming! She demonstrated a disturbingly profane vocabulary to vent her disgust with me. I responded to her first email advising I would be happy to unfriend him… he was and is ALL hers. However, that did not placate her. She somehow managed to find my cell phone number (to this day I don’t know how she did that) and left me a series of deranged and disturbing voicemail messages. It was getting scary. I suspect that due to her psychosis, she didn’t know the difference between Facebook and Match.com; or cheatin-whores.com.
I blocked her and reported her account to FB… after which time she managed to message me with more threats from someone else’s account. He also got blocked and reported. ‘Tom’ called me and apologized profusely. Apparently his woman-friend was off her meds. No kidding! He was actually a little miffed that I didn’t want to be FB friends with him anymore. I suggested he had much bigger problems to deal with in his life.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some cat videos to watch.