And other news from my year away from social media…
We’ve all heard the security and privacy reasons for kissing Facebook goodbye, but I actually turned mine off about two weeks before the scandal hit the news.
After about six months without it, you couldn’t pay me to get back on. Here’s what happened.
I had been wanting to shut it down for years. What started off as a fun way to show off dumb photos my senior year of high school seemed to have slowly morphed into an angry and unforgiving platform for one-sided fights and pathetic attempts at every person trying to change the mind of another. Have we nothing better to do than win petty fights, I often found myself wondering.
I grew up with a strong sense of trying to meet another person where they are and compromise. This hostile world was draining my energy and my moral.
Still, I continued to make the excuse that it kept me in touch with friends and relatives far and wide, and that it was worth it to keep those contacts close.
Scroll forward. Last summer we bought our first house, something I plan to write it’s own post about. Per my oldest daughter’s request we started her in ice skating lessons and I in turn dusted off my speed skates and started skating again after a ten year break. I’ve been considering going to some camps and tournaments since we don’t have an actual team in this area. Anyway, I say all of that because we really got plugged in at our local rink. We started worshiping in home church style with some friends and were actively engaging in real social situations which we had been severely lacking before.
And yet, I still held onto Facebook with a death grip…
Finally, last December, we conceived our third child. I had to take a break from skating, for obvious reasons, and so began the most nauseating first trimester to date.
In a faulty attempt to ignore the ever present queasiness and impending daily vomit, I quickly fell into the rut of sitting on the couch all day and scrolling through Facebook. And as I sat and scrolled I began to feel depressed. Real depression. The kind of sadness you can’t simply shake off.
Finally, my husband came to me and said “Why don’t you just delete Facebook for a month and see how it goes?” .
With a simple month trial I felt no hesitation and deleted it on the spot.
I could not have predicted what came next.
I felt better, immediately, Happy. Alive. I could not fathom how such a small thing had taken hold of me so hard that when let go of was like having your hair bound for ten years and in an instant it it let down. Simply put, I relaxed.
I could not believe that overnight my childlike joy came back. I had no idea the grip Facebook had on me until it was gone.
And that was what hit me the hardest, I had participated in this thing for TEN YEARS! Never stopping once to consider the emotional and social implications of said participation. Never once stopping to ask if I found Facebook an ethical company to be a patron of as I am at brick with other businesses.
I think the stress of facebook was two sided for me.
Stress #1: Rampant meaningless meanness.
The aforementioned, fights without forgiveness, the deliberate spray of hatred, and the unwillingness for people to hear others was crushing my soul.
I truly want people to listen to one another, even if it’s hard, and I want them to listen from a stance of kindness and love even if when parting they still disagree. If we can go into every argument with the mindset that we will probably still disagree at the end of the day, but that we will love no matter what, we would be so much more of a productive community.
Besides which, the truth almost always lies somewhere in the middle.
Stress #2: Constantly being in the public eye is very hard for me.
This has probably been the most difficult thing for me to come to terms with after leaving Facebook. I am a blog writer, and one who hates to be in the public eye. I had already been away from the blog for a time simply because my computer broke, we moved, everything with my upholstery got turned upside down in the move, etc.
After leaving Facebook, I realized, I am not very comfortable having everyone see me. This is evident for anyone who knows me because Elizabeth Ludden is not my true name..
Leaving Facebook was easy, I stepped out of the day-to-day scrutiny. Most of which was simply my own insecurities. I have struggled with spelling my whole life. I have worked really hard in the last many years to improve my spelling and I have, but being on facebook where words are everything, it was like a sore on my soul to have to have a spotlight on my written words.
Those worries and fears seemed to bleed into the blog here and I knew I needed a break, not only from Facebook, but from the blog. Today though, I feel ready for the blog. I realized, I can’t write without having done something worthwhile.
And now I have. I have taken a better part of a year to live. So I am back . Back to the internet. Back to the blog. But with more life lived. And more to say.
I felt totally free, but I had to ask myself some difficult questions. Do I want to be in any public forum on the internet? And that included the blog.
So, I stepped back. From it all. I thought, why not take a break from the blog too? See what I learn? I focused on tangible life. I focused on tangible relationships. And this is what I found out.
Life does not stop when you leave the internet behind.
Instead of joining in on Facebook events, with hords of people, I simply called friends up and we would meet up. I know, so 1990s right?
And you know what, I became closer with my friends. I have far fewer, for sure, five to be exact, but they are good friends. Friends who I laugh with, and cry with, and can act like a silly high schooler with.
I did not lose contact with my long distance friends either. Instead, I have had time to write hand written letters with them. Or talk on the phone. I will admit I did keep Facebook messenger, which my husband figured out that if you go to messenger.com and sign in with your previous Facebook login information you can still use messenger without having an active Facebook account.
So if you are feeling down and you think that Facebook might be contributing to that, take the plunge and delete it. Even if it’s just for a month. See how it feels. Live life with your eyes open a little wider. It feels good to be human.