I have been without Facebook for a month.

This doesn’t sound like something that is worthy of a blog post, but trust me – if you are a member of this or any other social network and you just stop cold turkey, it’s not as easy as you think.

Now before you sing my praises for my efforts, let me just put a pin in that balloon right now. It wasn’t my choice. I went to bed one night and woke up the next morning to the news that my Facebook page had been disabled. Not suspended, no warnings issued, no email alerts – my page was just GONE.

For the first week, I tried everything known to man. I cannot “log in” to send a message to support because my page apparently no longer exists. I found email addresses to various supposed Facebook “helpers,” (support@fb.com; hacked@fb.com; disabled@fb.com) and received a total of zero responses. I sent multiple emails a day from multiple email accounts. My main concern was to get my photos back. For over 16 years, I’ve used that platform as my “diary” so to speak. Everything I’ve done for the most part existed on that page, complete with photographic evidence. And worst of all – there were so many photos of my grandmother who recently passed that I know I do not have anywhere else. Same with my children’s father who passed five years ago. Yes, it says you have the option to “download” the information from your account, but it didn’t work for me because my account doesn’t exist. The “download” was an empty file. My memories are just gone.

So, the next logical step?  Start a new Facebook and try again. I can’t go backward but maybe I can at least go forward, right?

Wrong.

Somehow every single effort I made at setting up another account got shut down. Even though I no longer have an account out there, I am apparently attempting to “impersonate someone else” by setting up a new account (even when I lied about my name and birthdate). Listen, if I had put all this effort into cleaning my house instead of trying to get this social media platform back, that baby would be spotless. You’d see the sun reflecting off it from wherever you live, I promise. I truly tried everything.

Which brings us to now.

After a few weeks of obsessively trying to get my page back, I suddenly realized that I didn’t care quite so much. I mean, of course, I’ll always feel sick to my stomach for everything I lost that was stored on there. But to offset that loss, you know what I gained?

Peace.

So much peace.

It’s so quiet without thousands of voices telling you what you should think, say and feel. It’s so calm now that I don’t have to convince the world that I’m a great person and that I have a wonderful marriage and family and that my granddaughter is the cutest child on earth (I mean, she is though). Suddenly, I’m kind of free.

Now, with that freedom comes something else. Something that I bet always comes with freedom to an extent.

Loneliness.

I am realizing who were actually my friends in the true sense of the word, and not just the “friends” moniker that Facebook attributed to them. And believe me, there are very few. Only one or two non-family members have reached out to me. You mean, all those people I’ve been trying to impress for sixteen years weren’t even a real part of my life?  Welp – it looks that way.  And while it does sting a little bit, it’s also a bit gratifying. I’ve always had trouble trusting friendships and it looks like I was kind of right to do that. Without snarky comebacks, witty posts, and shared public morals, there was actually no friendship at all. Not really.

As someone who has lost friends as often as she loses sock mates lately, I can tell you that life is quieter. I don’t need to bounce things off multiple people to see what they think about what I do or think. I’m just going to do or think it. The people who matter will know. Or maybe they won’t – maybe some things I’ll just keep to myself. (Lord, it has taken me WAY too long to learn this one.)  No one walks in your shoes and when you give them the pretty version of your story, that’s all they know of you. When something you say or do veers from the path that you have created yourself for them to see, they sometimes don’t handle that so well and have a way of reminding you how “less than” you are because you aren’t sticking to the script. I don’t know, maybe this is just mumbo jumbo. It’s hard to put it into words but just suffice it to say that I feel more “real” now that I’m not trying to convince anyone of how great everything is.  Sometimes things just aren’t great and that’s okay too. The people who love you will take it all and love you right through it.

So anyway, here I am. On my blog instead of Facebook. I don’t know if anyone even follows this thing anymore, but it doesn’t matter really. This is a place for me.  I still need to get things out but from now on, I’ll be writing to myself. Not to everyone else. And things will be what they really are, not what I think people want them to be.

Hope you guys are living your lives for real out there.  If you’re not, figure out what needs to change. I think it might be pretty important.