To Surpass a Fear

Social media can be a platform to share your thoughts, and memories or to just take a break from your daily chaos in life. I had a Facebook account for a long time, and even though I didn't use it as frequently as my mom would complain, I used to get back to my old friends or at least thank people on my birthdays whom I wasn't even close with. 

One day I was chatting with an old friend; I don't even know if he deserved to be called such. He casually started flirting and I thought he will just go back to the normal conversations that we usually have, but he never did. So, I had to talk him down and I just took a break from Facebook to attend to my other important chores.

He was the same guy who had fixed a date for us to meet a month later, since we hadn't seen each other for a while. But I never thought I'll end up finding vulgar videos in my messenger, which was sent by him. I was just in my 2nd year of college, and I didn't know what to do or to whom I should say this. I just unfriended him, and I even tried deleting my Facebook profile, but in this meantime, he had the audacity to send me back a friend request. I immediately deleted my profile, I just couldn't use my phone for a very long time, nor did i say this to anyone.

         After a few days, the Facebook account got reactivated again since I had selected to deactivate it to 1 month rather than selecting it as permanent. I had got a few messages from others, and I was even scared to look at those messages, thinking that he might have used my picture in a bad video and had shared it with others or someone else had the same thought as his.

         Even today I don't have a Facebook account, whenever I see a video sent in WhatsApp by a friend, I take time to go and check the video. Even today I am worried he might come out of nowhere and destroy everything I'm trying to build. 

It's these situations that always go unnoticed, we mute ourselves against all these bullys. We never say this to anyone out of fear, that society would blame us and not them. But do we have to live in this fear, what did we do to deserve this? Mine can be a very small cyber harassment case but even such a subtle incident plants so much fear and doubt in oneself. 

We don't deserve to be treated this way, not only girls, anyone who is a victim of cyberbullying, harassments should be able to go and tell someone about it and seek necessary help, but again, can society ever understand this, can they ever be sympathetic without being prejudiced about our situation, I don't think so.

As the future of this same society should make sure these situations are avoided or at least be able to provide the aid and support those victims need and help them step out of their fear.