Consciously “Uncoupling” from Facebook
You learn quite a few things when you make the decision to delete 17 years of social media. Turns out I had been on FB since 2008, only 4 years after its inception. During that time, I’ve started several pages and groups, as well as using it to run ads for my businesses and book publishing. When you have a business account and everything is linked up, it becomes quite the entangled mess. Even I didn’t know how deep the rabbit hole went until I dove down it.
Giving Others the Wheel: There’ve been a few occasions over the years when I’ve paid marketing professionals to manage my social media accounts. When you you give someone those passwords, there’s a huge trust thing that happens. In order to create and run ad campaigns, as well as evaluate the effectiveness of ads, a lot of settings get manipulated. I also ended up “joining” (or rather, my various virtual assistants signed me up for) dozens of groups over the years in order to expand my reach whether it was in a specific niche (like women and motorcycling for instance) or specifically for marketing purposes like groups that promote each other’s books.
Let’s just suffice it to say there was a lot of conscious uncoupling that needed to be facilitated.
I read a few posts and articles on the “right” way to delete FB, and there are a few different opinions. Most people I’m sure just follow these basic steps:
Log into your Facebook account
Go to your profile picture in the top right corner
Select Settings & privacy
Select Settings
Select Your Facebook information
Select Deactivation and deletion
Select Delete account
Select Continue to account deletion
Enter your password
Select Delete account again
Follow the instructions to confirm
Unfortunately, it’s not always that simple. If you own groups, you either have to pick someone else to admin them or you have to individually remove each member and then leave the group yourself. So I found myself messaging each person in my groups to let them know why they were being removed, where to find me, etc. Then deleting each group one-by-one.
As I was doing this, I started to take stock of each person in my groups, each “relationship” represented there. Between my various groups, pages and friends I had thousands of followers. No, I didn’t unfriend each person individually. But I did go to each of the dozens of groups I belonged to and decided to look at each one before unfollowing and then leaving each group. I realize this was, technically speaking, a wholly unnecessary step, but honestly? It got me thinking about my divorce.
Divorce vs. Uncoupling: In 2014, after 27 years of marriage, 4 children, and lots of counseling, my ex-husband and I decided to call it what it was: a coupling that needed uncoupling. Counseling had been good for us, but some things just can’t be ‘fixed’ in the traditional sense of the word. Counseling taught us to use humor to acknowledge just how well we knew each other. When one of us was really pushing the other’s buttons, the other would say “I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you” with a dismissive hand gesture that meant “I need some space or I’m going to say something I might regret”.
I realize that in Muslim traditions this is no joke, and we weren’t trying to appropriate that custom, we were, I guess trying to diffuse some of the tension by using this phrase to let the other person know just how close they were to just giving up and walking away.
In hindsight I don’t think it was all that funny of a joke, but I guess in the moment, it provided a cooling off period so that we could regroup and try to communicate again in another way. We realized that with children and grandchildren together, we would be in each other’s lives at some level for the rest of our lives, and we weren’t going to penalize the family we’d built together for our desire to separate. It took a couple of years to work through the divorce, but in the end, we were able to carefully and intentionally uncouple our marriage, communicating about everything and supporting one another’s needs as best we could.
We didn’t even use lawyers. We worked it out fairly and filed the paperwork ourselves, saving ourselves thousands of dollars and lots of ugliness along the way.
I know. That sounds crazy, right? No lawyers? No. It’s not. We went through all the financial stuff together. We knew what each of us made and decided who should take on what and how to split up the “stuff”. It was really amiable. And still is. To this day, I count him as one of my best friends. Just because we didn’t work as a traditional couple doesn’t mean we didn’t have a lot in common. That doesn’t mean it was painless. Far from it. We’ve known each other since high school and you can’t be married that long without some baggage, but it was still the right way to do it.
I digress… Back to Facebook… After leaving all the groups I’d joined and deleting all the groups I’d started, I decided to go through my photos. Turns out it’s difficult to batch delete photos because of tagging and cross-posting and boosted posts, etc, so I took the opportunity to look at each photo and remove tags, deleting photos individually.
Wait… You INDIVIDUALLY Removed 17 years of photos?? That must have taken a long time… Well? I was laid up with COVID at the time so I pretty much spent a few days during my convalescence left and right clicking… But it was more than that. The act of looking at each photo helped me appreciate the memories and relive this timeline of my life. Well, the public one anyway, because nowhere in there did I post about my divorce or the crippling depression I went through for a few weeks during a particularly difficult part of the process.
“But You’re Deleting Your Diary!” A friend said to me. A lot of people use their FB as a continuous timeline of memories, and the thought of deleting it all is ghastly and unthinkable to some people. I don’t see it that way.
First of all, those memories are mine. They don’t belong to FB or Instagram or my followers. They live in my heart and my mind.
The photos I posted aren’t gone. They still live in my phone and on my computer. Facebook isn’t my own personal cloud storage solution. Neither is Instagram.
I Am Not My Past: Something I didn’t expect though was to feel nostalgic about some of the posts I’d written. Although a lot of it was drivel, some of it was heartfelt and deeply meaningful. But in the end, those thoughts, however authentic at the time, no longer represent the me I am today. So I read them, appreciated them, and deleted them along with everything else.
My Brain Picked Out Patterns: They say if you want to know what’s important to someone you need look no further than their calendar and their checkbook. I think I would add Facebook to this shortlist. Looking through hundreds of photos I was able to notice patterns that taught me things about myself. For one thing, there were an astonishing number of pictures with either alcohol or food or coffee in them. And lots of travel shots that felt less like sharing and more like bragging somehow. From a bird’s eye view, it seemed like a pretty hedonistic feed.
The External Validation Addiction: At first I posted things I liked and quickly learned to post things I thought other people would like and respond to, because the dopamine connection that becomes an addiction with our brains is a real thing. Look it up. There’s a TON of science about it. Then for a while it all felt fake and “market-driven” and then it felt too curated. I watched the evolution from the perspective of someone who was trying to learn from the data being shown to them, much like AI is trained by inputting lots of data and recognizing and cataloguing patterns.
Who needs AI? I didn’t need a computer or an algorithm to tell me about the patterns of my likes and dislikes. I looked beyond the surface. And I watched it evolve. A few years ago I started interacting less in the main feed and more in my groups. I started pulling away from curation and toward authenticity. In fact, in 2023 I posted 100 videos called “100 Days of Me” in an attempt to share authentically who I really am. I was reaching for connection. For intentional relationship to cut through the noise. I started posting more about the depth of the experiences instead of the experiences themselves, feeling drawn toward building and regeneration rather than rat-race and deterioration. And that evolution, that realization of what’s truly important to me is what has brought me to where I am today.
Lady Gaga once said that social media is the toilet of the internet, and that’s exactly how it felt. It was pulling me down into its circling vortex of hatred, distrust and fake news. These days, mainstream social media feels more like social propaganda, so I also decided to dive into all the different dungeons of Facebook’s bowels and figure out what data they were collecting and keeping tabs on and it was shocking and disgusting, much like the sewers that the toilet flush brings the dirty water to. Keeping my facebook alive even after I’m dead? What does that even mean?
I went through and changed settings and deleted information like addresses and credit card info and purchase history and phone numbers. And then I finally got to the end of all that I felt I wanted to do. At 11:30 pm on the second full day of devoting time to this conscious uncoupling, I was finally ready.
Systematically and Consciously Disentangling Myself Felt Like Breaking Literal Chains: I had chained myself to the opinions, influence and marketing plans of all those other people for so long that I almost hesitated before pushing the final confirmations buttons to delete ALL the Meta platforms: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. I had done my due diligence and notified everyone who was important to me about what was happening and where to find me. All that was left was just to do it. And so I did.
According to FB you have 30 days to change your mind before it’s “permanent” so I set a reminder in my phone for the date they said that they would permanently delete all my stuff from their servers, in order to celebrate the true freedom, but I still felt an immediate release. I felt like I had uncoupled an actual ball and chain from my heart, my mind and my LIFE. Deleting all the apps from every device I own was the final step in this catharsis and it. felt. GREAT.
Something about knowing I no longer have to check in on how the rest of the world is feeling and reacting to life brang with it a colossal sigh of relief. I’m not burying my head in the sand. I still stay current with life, but I’m no longer getting my “news” from FB first… From a skewed media outlet, or a bunch of people who are running on overtaxed nervous systems in a fear cycle that keeps sensationalism at the top of the news cycle. I’ll curate my own news feed, thank you very much. From outlets that I trust. And voices that report with balance.
The day my divorce papers came and the decree was final felt a lot the same. “Ok, that chapter is over” I thought. “I’ve got a blank canvas in front of me. What will I create with it? Or will I just enjoy the blank space for a while?”
As my nervous system continues to unwind itself and relax into a much-needed mental/emotional savasana, I can once again start being proactive instead of reactive. Thoughtful. Intentional.
And most importantly: FREE.
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