Facebook addiction: A Survivor’s Tale Part 6

College is supposed to be full of drinks and mayhem. And it was. It’s just that I didn’t really take part. It was as though there was a different slipstream with people getting wasted, vomiting. I glided past the footpath next to the pubs where, some time at night, or even during the day in fact, a student would burst out as if rushing to some forgotten appointment, only to let forth a stream of regurgitated lunch or dinner. It wasn’t pleasant, and it seemed like madness compared to what I knew, by now, to be a mild Facebook addiction.

I saw myself as being above the craziness, the hedonism of the mainstream students. My family was back home, rooting for me to succeed. And I was going to get there, if I didn’t get off the beaten track. You see, for me, the Facebook addiction was a way of staying safe. I couldn’t do the crazy stuff that the other kids were doing – it just didn’t seem sane or rational or whatever you want to call it. But when logged onto Facebook, playing Farmville or instant messaging, it just seemed like a fun vibe.

You don’t want to know why I was afraid of the real world. It’s not really relevant. But suffice it to say, there was real pain and hurt out there, and I was safe in here, looking at my screen and finding solace in the digital ink that would gloriously bring news, chat, opinions, banality. The Facebook status update was really the bane of my social existence, the chat feature an enabler, and Farmville, well, let’s just say that my Farmville addiction was a way of passing the time.

With each day, I’d get up and check my Facebook status update. I’d then head to the lectures in the morning, passing through Giovanni’s coffee van on the way. Giovanni was cool, always had a friendly word to say about the weather or whatever. I’d often meet up with people from my class and we’d walk together talking about stuff that had happened around college. I always found stuff to talk about, without mentioning my Facebook addiction, let alone my Farmville addiction. It just wasn’t sufficiently cool to talk about. I knew what a dweeb was, and I wasn’t gonna be one. Uh uh. Facebook addict or not, no-one was going to know about it.