Unplugging

Being a full time working mom of two is kicking my ass. Big time.  But today the ass kicking is a little too acute to blog about. I want to blog about it and I will, on another day that I won’t start crying.  I am struggling. So I am making some changes to make life a bit easier and enjoyable. One of those things is unplugging from facebook.

 

I have been having a love/hate relationship with facebook.  I have read about studies that report that the more time you spend on facebook the less happy you are.  I have read about how distracted we are by our smart phones. I was especially shocked by the recent incident that took place on a bus in SF. A suspected murderer waved a gun around, wiped his nose with it, put it away, took it out, and then later shot someone dead. A surveillance camera captured that no one noticed because everyone was looking at their phones. Our phones have changed us. 

 

I do not like the changes that have occurred within me.

 

A few weeks ago an acquaintance from my another stage in my life posted on facebook that a week after giving birth she was back to her pre-pregnancy weight. I was disgusted and immediately posted about her bragbooking.  In the hour following I watched how others agreed/liked/commented on/with my post. One good blog friend suggested I be more understanding, that perhaps this was a new mommy who was struggling. Well, I replied, this was NOT a new mommy, this was her second child. Another person from my high school days posted that it happened to her too and I shouldn’t hate on her. But, this commenter had previously shared with me that she didn’t know she was pregnant until she was 8 months gestation and she happens to be very overweight. I was like, how did you even know what you weighed!!! All this was going on in my head at 9:00 pm as I sat alone in my house. I was raging about the bragbooking and fakebooking. 

 

I realized I didn’t like how I was behaving .I was reacting poorly on facebook. I removed my post. Because the truth was I know the original poster struggled with a significant eating disorder. So her post had way more context than just merely bragging. And the commenter that didn’t know she was pregnant, she struggled with infertility and weight her entire life. Who was I to judge? But I totally was. In my facebook haze I was letting facebook get the better of me and spur me to be a person I didn’t want to be. 

 

I had been thinking about facebook a lot lately.  Something was going wrong with facebook and I. It was fun when I was first on it. It kept me connected to others, especially when I moved away.  I liked reading interesting links that others posted.  But increasingly the negative feelings I have while surfing facebook have more than outweighed the positive. I get annoyed and agitated by other’s posts. And I am not talking about the political stuff. What I deemed to be bragging, or gratuitous complaining bothered me. Or even worse were the posts that were inciting feelings of jealousy. I would post and look for validation through likes and comments.  And the most egregious influence is the distraction that facebook is for me. 

 

I have such limited time with my kids these days.  The time that I do have is not as quality as I yearn for. (I am not going to start crying.)  And what am I doing when I am with them? Staring at my phone, posting on facebook-feeling negative emotions.  This is not how I want to spend my time. 

 

Facebook has begun to feel toxic to me and like an addiction. When I am at work, when I should be working, I am checking facebook. When I am a passenger in the car when I should be looking out the window, or talking to the people in the car, I am looking at my phone.  I needed to do something about it.

 

I had about 380 facebook friends. I now have about 175. I unfriended  everyone that wasn’t actually a friend to me at some point in my life. All those acquaintances from different periods of my life-unfriended.  High school people who I was never friends with in the first place-unfriended.  I kept all my actual friends, my blog friends (there are only like five), and family members.  The people who I worried I might offend if I unfriended  them, because well I knew they were going through tough times-I didn’t want to inadvertently make them feel rejected by me-even though they probably wouldn’t notice-I hid them.  Family members who annoy the crap out of me, I hide their posts. 

 

Look I do not need to read about my cousin-in-law who during my work day is now making her own granola bars because store bought ones ar unhealthy-and then I rage about it. That really happened.  I had to make some changes. I kept everyone that I genuinely cared about and who I felt genuinely cared about me.  I am actually surprised that I kept 175 facebook friends. And of those 200 that I unfriended-have any noticed and contacted me?  Zero.

 

Then I took facebook off my iphone. Of course I could put it back on at any time.  But so far I have stayed on the facebook iphone wagon.  I do miss it. I do think about it. I do jones for it.  Those feelings confirm for me that I did the right thing. I do not want my children to see me staring at my phone rather than staring at or interacting with them.  Now if my children are sleeping and I have the time and energy, I go to facebook on our desktop computer at home.  I see what my real friends and family members have posted.  I don’t have the same negative feelings. I have consistently gone on facebook every evening since the purge.  Because I do want to see what is going on in the lives of those I care about-and apparently there are 175 people I truly and genuinely care about!

I have felt, freed.

Seriously, totally a good decision. 

Yep things have been rough.