Imagine this….

You have had a really shit few years. The details don’t matter but suffice to say you feel you are moving on, you have met someone who you want to spend more time with and all of the things you have been through are being pushed back away somewhere quiet in your mind. You know you will need to talk about it at some point, after all its nothing to be ashamed of, but you are not ready. Your new partner doesn’t know about your loss and you are both enjoying the next phase of your life. You have decided to move in together and you have been clearing stuff out, sending old clothes and junk to the charity shop. Most of it you will never use again so you feel good pushing things into black bin liners and giving them away.

A few weeks later you are sat in bed on a Saturday morning having a lazy coffee when one of your friends messages you on Facebook. The next thing you know you notice you have a few messages which is unusual – you have an account on Facebook but you are not a big user as you are quite a private person really, but it just seems the thing to do right now. Your friend says have you seen the post of you on Facebook?

You open your Facebook timeline and staring back at you is a picture of yourself and David, before he died, when he was looking drawn and ill. The photo is a precious one but is not for sharing, yet here it was. You read the post and you realise that the precious memory stick that you kept all those memories on must have been left in one of the handbags you took to the charity shop and one of the assistants at the shop was trying to find the owner. You knew they were trying to be kind, to reunite you with your photos, but its unbearable.

You didn’t expect the next thing to happen either. Before you could blink an eye the post was being shared, posted and shared, posted and shared. The list of messages were people who recognised you and who wanted to bring the post to your attention.

You wanted it to stop. Your new partner had no idea about David and you weren’t ready to share the story.

The trouble is you just can’t stop it. The messages keep coming and no matter how often you ask someone to delete the post it carries on being shared. It is breaking your heart.

This isn’t a true story but the essence of it is true. I shared something on Facebook recently – I thought I was being kind and helpful and I had no idea what distress I would cause. The person who messaged me I don’t know them well but I could sense their hurt and distress. I removed my post but of course it was too late and I was just a link in a chain of many postings.

The lesson I learnt was that kind sharing acts can cause harm. I had no idea those photographs I shared would hurt but they did. We often talk about the negative aspects of sharing and I often see posts from teachers who are deliberately showing kids how far images can spread but I have shared things when I thought it was the ‘right’ thing to do. I won’t do this anymore. I have never really shared missing person pictures either and here is a great blog on why:

You never really know the back story and no matter how well intentioned you might be it can go wrong – so I will be sharing no more.

Anne