Agency: The Power and Peril of Social Media and Other Things

A large part of my life and career has included creating: creating awareness, creating change, creating resources, creating warmth, creating empathy and connection, occasionally creating a bit of fun and chaos.

I most often do this work of creation in my therapy room. I also create at my desk - quietly typing away - telling stories, giving voice to the human experience, and a little understanding alongside it. A surprising amount of my work has involved social media. No one goes to graduate school and says, “Oh! You know what I want to do…change the world through Facebook!” But as the world turns, social media is one massive way we all connect, find information and learn new things. For several years I:

produced videos and led live workshops.

recorded podcasts and released them to the universe.

answered questions and led discussions on the Heidi Goehmann Writes pages, through DMs, and connecting with friends of friends of friends.

It was good and challenging work helping people see each other more fully, encourage kindness over judgment, and consider new ideas mindfully, all in an online space. There were days I didn’t particularly want to deal with Facebook, a few days I wanted to ignore Instagram, and times I set my phone aside to remind myself that there was more to my work than attempting to change the world through Facebook.

Then one day, it was all gone.

I woke up one morning and had been ejected from Facebook. Within two weeks time, I was blocked from Instagram, What’s App, and any Meta owned social media outlets. From what my friends tell me, it was like I had never existed in these spaces entirely, which was eery, a little freeing, a lot weird, and over time incredibly frustrating.

I had lost my agency.

Agency:

the ability to create action or movement of one’s free will; the internal sense that resources, help, ability, capacity, and power are accessible to me in some way

While I was sleeping, someone, somewhere posted demeaning and oppressive links and pictures under my profile on Facebook, and by the time I woke up, Meta had flagged and then deleted my accounts. There is no argument system, no appeal beyond interacting very briefly with AI.

Social media for many of us is for memes and watching people bake things we’ll never bake and figuring out how to fix minor plumbing. Social media is also necessary for work, for school, or for finding the menu of your local restaurant to decide if you can afford to eat there. It would be great if social media were optional, and to a degree, it is, and it is not. Agency, or our ability to choose and move within our lives, matters in this realm too.

Agency is an emotion, a sense or a feeling within us. Agency is also an objective reality. Agency is the complicated conglomeration of the choices available to us in our life and our ability to access those choices and the things we need for following through. Agency is about power - my power, your power, and the powers that be.

Power in this broken world is often unbalanced in far more challenging ways than my social media eviction. Things like poverty, social connectedness, gross domestic product, access to education, generational trauma, racism, sexism, agism, elitism and more, all impact our internal sense of agency.

Consider this exercise:

What is something you want? How do you go about procuring this thing? What or who is involved in supporting you in accessing this thing or dream or idea? Is it within your reach or out of your reach? What might get in the way of you procuring the thing?

Who or what could shift or contribute something in someway to make it more accessible to you?

How does it feel to consider what you can reach for and what is less reachable or unreachable?

This is the sense of agency within you. Even being aware of this thing called agency can impact our ability to navigate and make choices and access what we need. Being aware that we all need agency and sometimes it feels quite unavailable, helps us sit in compassion with others in a more expansive way.

Back to Heidi’s agency: I let my social media problem sit for 6 months.

I had brief and extremely helpful trauma therapy for what had been taken from me and how to move forward.

I consulted a creative professional.

I restarted the single social media space that had always found safe, fun, and meaningful: Instagram. I couldn’t use my name (loss of agency), so I used my podcast name (access to agency).

I began again with a lot of love and support from people who cared what I had to put out into the world (access to agency).

May your days be full of agency. May you have access to personal power, to walk, run, and dream in the ways God invites you uniquely. May your compassion for others hold the awareness that sometimes agency feels shockingly outside our reach. May this compassion reign in your system as you navigate your life and also be extended toward all those you encounter, navigating everyday, their own.

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