Looking for Something Facebook Can't Give Me

An oddly emotional goodbye to a platform that breeds hate and misinformation and hasn't served me for years... or ever.

This weekend, I deleted my Facebook account.

When I joined Facebook it was, I believe, right after college, and all of my friends were there. So were all of my not-friends, people from high school who I knew but didn’t really know, people who had witnessed some of the worst years of my life, probably without really understanding what they were seeing, people who I had curiosity about but also anger at, fear of, fascination with. It is that strange cocktail of wanting and not-wanting someone in your life that first made Facebook a place to be.

I have to go back further though. I was around 11 when we got dial up and my own AOL account, and very quickly after that, my school also introduced a network of its own, with email addresses and slow-loading features. The internet— especially chat features— first on AOL and my school network, and then later on gmail and Facebook— were these strangely huge parts of my relationships, especially the romantic ones. I have written entire novels (this one, for instance) about the way it felt to fall in love, late at night, with my longest term high school boyfriend, as we chatted on AOL and navigated all the toxic dimensions that a high school romance might have. And ours had many, many toxic dynamics that I still grapple with today. (Incidentally, that book, LIFE BY COMMITTEE, was inspired by this incredible French film that still inspires my work now. Go ahead, watch it.)

Still, I have a strangely romantic longing for the way that version of digital life felt— it offered enough distance to help you say things you wouldn’t normally say, and it felt mysterious and private and quiet and secret. It was a world of ellipses, used wildly, uncontrollably, provocatively.

In college, that boyfriend and I continued communication on chat and through our away messages— mostly song lyrics demonstrating our distress. I have combed through every Counting Crows song and can definitively confirm that there is something there for every heartbreaking moment of your life. (I stand by August and Everything After as my favorite album of all time, don’t fight me.) For a while, he used a smiley face with sunglasses as his away messages on certain nights when things were strange between us, when he wasn’t returning my calls. Later, I surmised that this was an emoji symbol for spending time with the girl he was cheating on me with. I should have given up on social media then, honestly.

Recently, I’ve been writing some essays about things that happened in the past, and I’ve had the strange sensation of re-reading these old chat transcripts, between me and boyfriends, me and friends, and the result is a sort of humiliation even worse than what I find in my own diaries. In my diaries, I knew I was just talking to me. In these chats, I have to reckon with the fact that this is who I was out in the world, that this was how I wore my anxieties and fears and feelings. In these chat transcripts I can practically see the heavy fog of my own unworked through STUFF that dominated these interactions, how impossible I found it to see beyond my confusion and heartache and longing. How my anxiety was an outward facing thing, the only part of me my friends were interacting with.

Facebook was a bit of that, early on, but also something else— the showing off of the life I was living. I am a person who loves rites of passage. There is something about the way it confirms my okay-ness that is an antidote for the times I haven’t been so sure about it. I loved being 22 and having pictures of me silly and partying in Lower East Side bars, and having my statuses be inside jokes with my friends, and declaring in that small way that I was okay, I was normal, I was blending in, I was the idea of the girl I hoped I would someday become.

Back in high school, I wasn’t afforded that luxury, and at 22 Facebook was a place to plant my flag in my own okay-ness.

In early motherhood too— which I am still in, I think— it was a raft, a place to make sure I still existed. With limited childcare, it was easy to feel a bit lost to the nap schedule and nursing and even the joys of first words (wow, up) and first steps (at 16 months), and Facebook, sometimes, was a way to make myself feel real again. Here I am, mothering. See? I am doing it. I am here. Even if I am not exactly out in the world, I am still, somehow here. Right? Tell me I’m here.

The itch isn’t fully scratched. I’m still on instagram. I deleted twitter from my phone but didn’t delete my account. But. I ended my relationship with Facebook, where many of my friends have been long gone. The company knows the harm it does to teens, to girls like the girl I was, in particular. Lost ones, who want to know they are okay. Ones in the fog of anxiety, who want to show the world they are here, they matter, they are surviving, they can fit in.

The solution— at 16 with a boyfriend I wish I’d never met, at 22 with a cosmo and an officially designated Going Out Top, at 35 with a smiley newborn, now with a spirited kid flying towards four— was never, actually, social media. Social media never actually told me I was okay.

Publishing doesn’t either, as much as I still sometimes search for it, beg for it, to.

But writing. This here. My old diaries. The books on the shelves. The ones I am right now struggling to move from my heart to the page... (loaded ellipses, AOL chat style) Writing just might be the thing that tells me I am okay.

And me too. Sometimes, at almost 40, I can tell it to myself too.

Some Recommendations:

I just finished this very difficult but beautifully crafted and immersive and multi-dimensional non fiction book, HIDDEN VALLEY ROAD. It is part the story of a family, part a dissection of the science of understanding mental health from a medical perspective, part a journey through the way our compassion, knowledge, research, and stigmas evolve over time.

Much like my journey to find the perfect sheets, I also am on a perpetual journey to find the perfect pajamas. Currently, these are fitting the bill. Comfortable and cute and very much what I’m looking for.

We made donuts (pumpkin for fall of course!) for the first time this week, and I highly recommend this lovely recipe that I got from a writer friend.

I will be mentioning this until its release in January (and maybe after) but my next YA novel, LAWLESS SPACES, is a novel in verse and is a multigenerational novel that I am extremely proud of and excited for. It is both like and unlike my other novels, and I am hopeful will be a propulsive and unique read. Pre-orders help a great deal, especially in these times with delays across the industry, and if you’d like to order one from my local indie, I would be thrilled.

While you’re at it, the last book in my HAND ME DOWN MAGIC series, for ages 5-8, MYSTERIOUS TEA SET, will be out in January as well. These books would make great holiday gifts for readers for chapter books in your life— the first three are out now, and the final one releases on January 11th. This last one wraps up the series in a way I feel great (and a little sad) about, and really aims to capture what all my books do— a rejection of the idea of perfection, and an embracing of honesty in our relationships. Turns out, I’m finding ways to right about those themes for every possible age! Never say I am not consistent.

Happy October to all, and I hope you are all enjoying the chill in the air— I certainly am.