The Month-Long Facebook Purge

thanks again someecards - no need to encourage my Facebook creeping

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: it was the age of social media – a time where your friends are just a poke away, your social life is public domain and how you look in your profile picture determines how many dates you can get. Welcome.

With only a click, we can become instantly engaged to 500 of our closest friends or check up on the intimate lives of famous celebrities summed up in 140 characters. Everything and everyone is so accessible. I find out most of my news – local, national and even personal (happenings with friends or friends of friends) through social media.

So what happens when you disconnect from one of these major platforms for more than 24 hours? If you can even last that long? Well, I did it. I committed to over a month of Facebook-free life, and I live to tell the tale. But you may find yourself asking, why do it? Why purposefully sever an integral part of my life, one that feeds my inner gossip-monger and piques every single creepy curiosity? Ah, of course – the dreaded break-up.

When my last relationship ended, I spent the first 24 hours crying and then the next were spent snapping into survival mode. It was over, and to ward off the next few weeks of incessant “Facebook stalking,” I did what I needed to do: I deactivated my Facebook.  Was it because I have no willpower? Because I needed to prevent myself from checking-up on my now ex-boyfriend’s every musing and shared life detail? Well, yes and yes. Twenty-years ago, I may have called him and hung up, but now I had the new temptation to sift through photographs where he looked cute and decipher the hidden meanings of his statuses, hoping that they pertained less to a new lady and more to his devastation over our break-up. How is a girl supposed to move on when her ex’s face is plastered all over her news feed?

Answer: she can’t. And so, I embarked on this month long journey of Facebook detox, and I realized something – my world didn’t end. In fact, it kept spinning and I was okay; perhaps, even better than okay, I was happy. Perusing the latest news and photos on Facebook, I was constantly comparing my life to those carefully curated posts by my Facebook “friends.” Ah yes, there’s a friend on a cruise with her extremely good-looking, rich, doctor boyfriend having lunch with Ryan Gosling. Oh, and there’s a status update about a guy I used to go to school with announcing his new scientific discoveries on the moon and his subsequent Nobel prize. What have I done today? Oh yeah, I ate some leftover pizza, kissed my dog and didn’t cry about my ex-boyfriend. Wins all around.

After disconnecting from Facebook, I was less concerned about what others were doing and more concerned about what I was doing. The temptation to see what my ex was up to disappeared and that interest evaporated, as it was no longer presenting itself to me in updates on my news feed. And isn’t that the way it should be? I could focus on myself and not linger on the end of my break-up. Even more so, I was no longer baited by alluring statuses or heavily edited photos that my friends were posting, and therefore, no longer feeling as miserable. I forgot that each person has individual control over what they post, and obviously, they are only going to post things that portray their lives in the way they want to portray them. Facebook posts and tweets are heavily manipulated representations of our lives. If I want to come across as a spontaneous, fun-loving gal, I need only post photos and statuses of doing spontaneous, fun things. Similarly, if I wanted to garner sympathy or attract a sense of camaraderie from my friends over my current break-up, I could easily post broken-hearted statuses representing my side (and my side only) of the break-up. Essentially, we Photoshop our lives and only show the sides we want other people to see – deceptive and manipulative, maybe, but also very protective and defensive, naturally.

By no means is this necessarily a bad thing – I’m not exactly advocating for full-disclosure of your life’s every detail, good or bad (And there are those people who post too much. Do I need to know about the regularity of your bowel movements or read your comments as you live-tweet a funeral? No, I most definitely don’t), but this Facebook-free month allowed me to take a step back and re-evaluate why I was going on Facebook and what I was doing when I was on there.

When used for good (and not evil!), social media is a great tool for connecting to friends, but also connecting to communities all over the world. I didn’t need to use Facebook as a way for me to wallow in self-pity and misery. I was already miserable enough. What I needed to do was get offline and be with my friends – my REAL friends. Re-reading Facebook comments, looking at shared photographs and over-analyzing my ex-boyfriend’s Facebook statuses would not have been productive, by any means. Had I kept Facebook for that month, I have a feeling I would have held on to something that had already been long gone. However, de-activating my page was a sort of way of forcing me to start moving on and stop relying on social media to keep me engaged and connected with people, when what I really needed was offline support. Social media is fun, but being social is more fun.

True, I have since re-activated my Facebook. I’ll admit, I occasionally spend too much time reading statuses or looking through photos, but I try to remember why I use Facebook and keep it limited to those activities.  Do I Facebook stalk my ex-boyfriend? Well… I realized, that is what the “unfriend” button is for – for now, I have learned to co-exist with exes of all sorts (boyfriends, friends, etc.) on social media. Until the next break up?...