Woman Travels the Globe to Meet Facebook Friends and Overcome Anxiety
What do 325 Facebook friends, one romance novelist, and a New Year’s resolution have in common?
They are the topic of an upcoming documentary called “Face to Facebook” about a woman who went on a year-long journey to overcome her fear of people and leaving her home.
Writer Arlynn Presser spent December 2010 isolated and mostly housebound because of panic attacks and anxiety. Although the 51-year-old had over 300 friends on Facebook, she realized that most of them were people she had never met. At the end of the year she made a resolution to spend 2011 traveling the world to meet these people she had only ever talked with online. Many she had met through the only Scrabble game.
Some did not agree to meet her, some unfriended her, but over the course of the year she was able to visit 292 of her 325 friends in countries around the world; quite an accomplishment for someone previously afraid to board planes and trains.
What can we take away from her huge accomplishment? Although her primary issue was panic disorder, people with social anxiety disorder (SAD) might find themselves in similar situations; you might have a lot of acquaintances (either online or offline) but not have made the effort to really get to know any of them.
How would you feel about making 2012 the year to turn some of those casual acquaintances into good friends?
Further Reading
Photo © f2fb.net