quitting.

Today is the story of how I quit Facebook, which is a fairly short story. I’ve been thinking about it for awhile. I love to see pictures of my nephews and reminisce about the past, but it’s hard to get those good things and nothing else. The real estate that it all claims in my head is precious. I don’t want it filled with people who aren’t really in my life or people who I just want to spend my time judging. So I deactivated my account this morning.

I may have been thinking about it for awhile, but only decided just yesterday that I would actually do it. I feel both relieved and suddenly in the dark. Oddly (I’m embarrassed to admit) the thing I feel most anxious about is the terrible pictures of me that might wind up in the world that I won’t be able to filter out. The fact that my anxiety lies there tells me everything, and definitely tells me that I made the right choice. For all the incredible usefulness of social media, I am prone to brutal comparison and self-criticism and I struggle with being my true self rather than the glossed over version. I’m not here with some manifesto against social media or Facebook, but only that it is the right choice for me to leave it for now.

For someone who doesn’t have children, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about (and struggling with) how I would choose to raise children in this world. I feel strongly that technology and those devices we chain to our bodies do strange things to little developing brains. But I also know full well that, though I may fantasize about escaping into the woods to live and die quietly off the grid, that wouldn’t be right (for me). I care too much about the world and what happens to it next.

And when I start to feel like the world is changing much too fast and its going to fuck up this generation and the next and we’ll have a totally different sense of empathy and identity and connection, then I try to remind myself that I am not the first person in the first generation to think that. After all, we humans used to not write things down. We would remember stories and we would tell them to each other. Writing changed everything, but it worked out just fine. Someday someone will say the same about The Internet and Technology and Social Media.

At any rate, the world is both very big and very small. I’m not always great at connecting with people. I am great at starting over and feeling alone and then starting over again. My hope for this year is to be more of myself, and part of that means gathering up people who are my tribe. And I know, without a doubt, that I am more myself in the real world than the digital, so that’s where I’ll be for now.