Facebreak...

To say I've been agonizing over whether to keep my facebook account alive is a little dramatic and yet not completely untrue.

For the past year or so, my relationship with facebook has been like a relationship with a boyfriend in high school - breaking up with it on a Monday only to make a jackass of myself and get back together with it on a Wednesday and restart the drama cycle until I decide on a Tuesday three months later that we're not compatible, and I need some space, and it's not facebook, it's me...

This definitely looks like a break from something, doesn't it?

I conflated my presence and activity on facebook with real connectedness to friends I was afraid to alienate by ceasing an activity that I no longer enjoyed.

So, like the 16 year old me (who talked daily for hours on the phone with my friends after hanging out with them all day at school) would have done, I tried intermittently to get my friends to join me over on G+ so I could be with them all the time wherever in the social networking world I went.

And that was a fail.

Because people like what they like when they like it, and some of my friends just happen to like facebook right now, even though I kinda hate it. Just like they might listen to music, eat foods, watch shows, read news articles, and explore hobbies in which I have no interest, and which make them no less my friends, but which facebook is determined to let me know about in truly creepy stalker-like fashion anyways.

So I kept on going back in order to keep in touch with people who know full well how to get a hold of me outside of social networking (and vice versa), answering the subliminal call of that little red number that alerted me whenever someone said or did something that had about a .1% chance of really sustaining a relationship that should extend beyond the blue, white, and irrelevant ad littered confines of facebook.

With every begrudging login of the past few months, I was coming that much closer to the realization that I had become a servant to this thing that had ceased to serve me. That I was feeding my precious limited time and attention to a thing that no longer fed me. And not that social networking doesn't actually serve a great purpose in my life - just not facebook style.

So as a 40 year old woman with a marriage to nurture, a family to care for, a career to rebuild, friendships to further, and a self to preserve, I've realized that I should take a decisive and unapologetic break and reclaim however many minutes or hours better appropriated to the aforementioned.

My friends know where to find me, and I them. :)

shinae