Detox – Day 1

The first thing I did was remove Facebook from my cell phone yesterday around lunchtime.  It felt amazing.  It was as if I had suddenly been relieved of a giant responsibility, a chore, an item on my daily to-do list that I was just sick of doing.  Granted, this “to-do” is one that orchestrated for myself all on my own.  

But I felt relieved nonetheless.  

Suddenly I didn’t have the urge to take my phone to the restroom and check my page while I peed.  (yes, I realize how awful that must seem, but I assure you I am not even remotely exaggerating.)  

It felt so good to realize I didn’t have the urge to pick up my damn phone every five minutes to see if I missed anything.  Because guess what?  I probably did miss something, but I didn’t miss being in the loop.  And that was HUGE.

But I can’t lie.  I feel like a hypocrite.  Just a little bit.  Except I keep reminding myself that I’m not on Facebook for 30 days because I think it’s bad.  I am taking a break because it’s bad for ME.  

I have a cheating heart of sorts because I kept my one super-secret account, the one that has no friends, that will NEVER have any friends (the loneliest Facebook account ever) so I can continue to use Facebook in my work and volunteer life.  

You see, I have two pages that I admin, and a book page for the day when I actually have time to write my book, which looks like will be somewhere around, oh I don’t know, maybe NEVER.

So in a way I feel like I’m working the system, but I’m really not.  What I AM doing is just selfishly promoting my own interests.  Which, let’s be real here, is exactly what I was doing before, but under the guise of just being connected to a global community.  

Now, it’s just out in the open.  I’m a shameless self-promoter.  I feel somewhat liberated.

The moment that I hit deactivate on my account this morning, as anticlimactic as it was, I felt the urge to post on my Facebook page: “Just deleted my account.  Man that feels good.”  I’m not even making that up.

Then later this morning I heard about a situation at school with my daughter and I wanted to post something snarky, passive aggressive and very “double birds-ish” without being too obvious.  

Then I remembered I couldn’t and I was ever-so-thankful to have removed that option.  Nothing like stepping in a pile of shit you created all by yourself.  

I did have one moment of “I will not have a clue what’s going on out there” as I saw several Facebook posts relating to the 3.3 earthquake we had last night as I prepared to deactivate. 

I also realized that surely the TV news picked that story up (along with well, most other newsy things), and in the scheme of things it isn’t really something I need to know about and I clicked the “deactivate” button with little to no feeling at all.

I sent a simple text to my husband that read simply: Done.   

He knew what I meant, as his reply was “Free at last!!!” and mine was a simple “Free at last” right back.

And that’s how I feel right now.  

Free.  

And it feels amazing.