I have a lot of  weaknesses, and some are these – I just hate whining, struggle stories, people who presume to tell me who I am and what I need, unwanted advice, alarms and warnings, drama, nasty people who post nasty messages from digital distances, the self-righteous and the angry swarming mobs of the political and animal world. Why is this a problem?

Because the Internet, e-mail and social media bring each of these things to me every single day. Because I am increasingly coming to think my soul is struggling for relief, calling to me for help.

As the blog has grown, more people come in all of the time, and this is good for me, it something I seek and encourage. I tout my Facebook likes all the time and encourage subscriptions to pay for my work. I have expanded my work on various social media, in podcasts and Instagrams, Tweets and Pinterest Boards.

If that isn’t enough, I am committed to be open (mostly) about my life. When I go on insulin, I write about it, along with my life with animals, my bouts with fear and depression and anger, my struggles to become a fully developed human being, a journey-in-progress. All of this puts me in direct conflict with the outside world every day, as the notion of boundaries, privacy, self-determination and space has been increasingly obliterated online by social media messagers and corporations who keep invading my space and telling me it is for my own convenience and self-interest. I think many days of what good old Henry David Thoreau would have done had he been on Facebook at Walden Pond, barraged with alarms, environment and animal activists, people offering advice on eating squirrels, wood stoves and canoe safety, suggesting he was self-absorbed, weak-minded, incompetent,  or just out there for the money, reminding him he was cooking frogs in the wrong way, telling him how brother Herb patched their roofs.

Thoreau was a poet and chronicler of space and I am a great lover of space, it is the essence of me, I valued it before the concept became a social media site and people felt the need to post their trips to the bathroom. As I get older, I am increasingly wary of getting grumpy, yet this week I found myself once again writing grumpy messages in replies to messages that abused and violated my space. One woman saying I had no one but myself to blame for not selling Bedlam Farm, I was posing ridiculous boundaries by wanting people to have money enough to pay the rent or caring what they did with the place. There was a veritable avalanche of whining and lament because we had to reduce the number of people on the Open Group to a manageable size. “You hurt me,” wrote one ex-member, “I am really a good person,” as if I were making individual character evaluations.

Struggle stories abound on social media – dead dogs, sick moms and dads, illnesses and travails. Somehow, this has become a medium for trading pain and suffering. And getting a lot of sympathy. I don’t seek sympathy when I share my life, I seek authenticity and hopefully, can relate something that may be useful. And the social media world encourages the idea that we are all intimate buddies, that we are available all day to chat with one another and trade stories and tales. As a writer, I believe in inter-activity, I have preached it for years, but I also see that increasingly it demands more boundaries and discipline that writers have ever had to muster. And I see that new technology is an addiction and obsession for many people. That will not be me, I have had enough addictions and obsessions in my life, I know them when I see them, I am not going there.

I knew when I wrote about diabetes that my very personal medical space and boundaries would be trampled and I was not wrong. Maria began getting messages about the need for me to wear white socks (there is not any need for that), other people sent me a stream of Facebook messages offering books, grisly amputation testimonies, tales of their mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, the telephone number of their doctors or, in some cases, the doctors themselves. I am starting a new Open Group this week – this one on the love of animals, and people have asked me why I would bother to do this, and the answer is because it is worth it, all of it. I love my blog, I love my life. I just have to figure how how to preserve my space.

I admit I am struggling to preserve this inner space, my soul really, from this invasion that I have, in so many ways, invited. I am not sure how to do it. Every day, some bank, media company,  business or credit card company or person finds a new way to invade my space with information I do not want or need, with advice I do not want, with presumptions that are not true.

Some first steps:

– Facebook messaging and notifications are the worse source of abuse, invasions of privacy and space, lack of boundaries. It is very important for me to solve this in a reasoned and practical way. I am not interesting in spending a lot of time learning who likes my likes, shared my photo, commented on my comments, likes anybody else’s comments. I am talking to a tech adviser today on ways to limit these messages or eliminate them entirely. I am also going ahead and  planning a new Open Group – and this is my dilemma, I want to move forward, I want to move back. The conundrum of our times.

– I have expanded my walking, time with the animals,  reading books, walking with dogs, things that take me out of this system. This morning, Red and I had a beautiful walk, he is learning to be on the road with me and handle whizzing trucks and cars, hard for him and many border collies, he wants to herd them. This is nourishing for my space, it heals and expands it. I’m looking for other things, counter-balancing things.

– I am meditating twice a day now, a half-hour in the morning, a half-hour in the evening. Taking photos in the morning, then again in the afternoon, pursuing photographer’s light, thinking about and expanding my photographic work.

– I will reinforce my conviction and practice that my life is not an argument, I see that has slipped somewhat for me, some of the comments are so outrageous and inaccurate it is difficult not to answer them, it requires great discipline. On Facebook, people are used to sending messages, listening is not so simple. My blog is monologue, not a dialogue and this is a noxious habit it is easy to slip into, this defending oneself and draining one’s energy in eternal arguments. This is the dark hole of media, the political world, social media.

– I am trying to put together – with Maria – a kind of Sabbath, a Saturday or Sunday when I disconnect from this world, turn off all of my devices, devote my time to loving Maria, to the animals, to my reading and thinking and photography. This idea has really grown on me.

– I am disconnecting from this world in the late afternoon or early, returning to blog at night, a custom and tradition I love.

This is an important, not a trivial issue and I have been consistent about it until recently, when all sorts of newcomers have come onto the site and I am attempting to do more things. A meaning life is not a survey or debate of beliefs, it is about decisions taken and owned.  I am not seeking advice, not willing to argue my beliefs in this system of contention and disconnection.

Arguments, grumpiness or annoyance are traits that undermine creativity, violate my space and damage mental and physical health. They are the antithesis of spirituality, of a calm and centered self. And they will affect the quality of my thought and work. And I don’t want to forget that most of the messages are nice and often quite interesting, even if I can’t respond to them.

If I want to be in this world, and I do, and I want to write in this world and share my work – I do – then it is up to me to take responsibility for preserving my space and creative sense of self – not benefited by argument and whining or nastiness. My space is my center, my grounding, my creative soul, it is crying out for some relief from these intrusions and assaults, and this is a call I will heed. As always, I’ll share the process. It is, I see a difficult thing, a complex thing. It will not be simple. I’ve dealt with worse.