9-25-12 leaving facebook: the one week break-up report

Today marks one week of being facebook-free.

I was on the way into the office last Tuesday to work, after spending all Monday waiting for Century Link to repair the internet outage that stranded me and put me terribly behind. I've been sorting through quite a lot of personal emotional baggage over... gosh... years, but most critically in the past months, which was coming to head at home.  And in the car, I just felt this absolute gut-churning necessity.

The first thing I did when I got online at work was to pull the plug on my facebook account.

I didn't post any goodbye message or state my intentions or get people to talk me out of it.  I just quit, immediately and almost without thinking.

I just needed to feel... unburdened is the only word I can come up with... of at least one factor in my life.

And Facebook had become much more of a burden than it was an enjoyment lately.

There was no noble outrage behind my decision, no fear of privacy infringement, or of wasted time (although I discovered later this is a huge incentive that should have motivated me).

I just wanted out.

In fairness, I feel like I ought to say Facebook has also brought me quite a lot of joy in our four year run together. I've been able to reconnect with a number of people that I would have lost touch with completely and get to know others who'd only been on the periphery of my awareness. But, with a week away, I have to ask whether much of that sentiment is just so many different variations of smoke and mirrors. What does "reconnect" mean, anyway?

(By the way, many thanks to Facebook for setting up the "guilt" page before you can deactivate: "But, your friends will miss you!" it says, with pictures of the people you've most often interacted with smiling back at you.)

Want to know the total of people I usually communicate with on facebook who've reached out to me after I left?

Three.

And two of them live in the same house as I do.

Apart from Bob, who called almost immediately because he saw he was no longer married (deactivation will do that) and Sam, who didn't notice until she went to see the homecoming pictures I normally would have had posted before she saw I was gone, only Deana texted me to touch base.

This has given me pause.

I certainly didn't leave to have people miss me. But the fact that it feels like almost no one does is a little eye-opening. What kind of relationships am I talking about when no one even knows you're gone?

So, what started out as a "just not now" deactivation has, in the space of a week, become closer to "probably not ever."

The little bits of time I'd spent cruising the newsfeed had become excruciating, as the election nears, and people get so much nastier towards one another. Status updates are so often Twitter-world sarcasm and not much else.  Getting de-friended without a word by people I'd once thought really were friends had left me wondering what I'd done. I'd caught myself week ago realizing I was reading nothing that really interested me apart from some external links.  I'm subscribed to my friends' blogs, and I have the links to favorite things, like Open Culture and Big Think. I don't need a facebook feed to provide their content.

Bob is still coming to terms with my absence. He went to check in when we were out to eat and realized he could not tag me. A lot of the pictures of both him and Sam that were from my account are gone. I do feel badly that I'd set up a reunion page recently in the hopes of getting the word out about next summer's 25th and now it will be adminstrator-less. The Almeda Mall page has been orphaned. And apparently everyone in my family expected me to forever provide the picture service that they'd relied on.

But somehow, I think everyone will survive.

Will I miss keeping up with some people? Sure. But maybe they'll seek me out and we'll continue our conversations elsewhere. And if not, that's okay, too.

In this new space, there is often silence, or reflection, or writing, or music, or books. All much better, more real things than whatever it was that Facebook was supposedly offering.

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