A status update

A week ago I deactivated my Facebook. It's strange how little I miss it, considering how much I time I spent on Facebook over the last 7 years.
 It's funny how often I hear people say, "I want to get ride of my Facebook, I just can't."
Me too. That's how I felt.

 Because I think all of us can universally agree that Facebook sucks, but it's also so blasted useful.
It's how we connect and contact our friends, how we know what's happening in everyone's life, and how we share our own lives with the people we care about.
 Right?
 Kind of.
 Let's be honest: I use Facebook to waste time. I spend many more minutes clicking on links to BuzzFeed lists of gifs of mean cats or babies with drawn-on eyebrows than I do "connecting to friends." Facebook makes me hate everyone.
 It makes me want to rise up against the government. It makes me want to move to the woods and ignore all my neighbors (except the animals). It makes me want to homeschool my children. It makes me want to write angry letters (or blogposts).

 And yet.
It prevents me from doing any of those things by keeping me occupied with scrolling down my never-ending newsfeed.
I pass links with titles like, "This girl did something somewhere and YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT."
I pass Facebook status' like, "I'm done with love. If you can't accept me at my worst, you DON'T DESERVE ME AND I CAN DO BETTER."
And of course, "I'm yellow, what color are you? Take this quiz to find out your INNER COLOR." 
Because obviously that's a thing. An important thing.

 The first few days after quitting Facebook, I would find myself constantly opening the folder on my phone and hovering my thumb over the place that the little F icon used to be. I wasn't looking something up. I wasn't doing anything. My fingers were just programmed to open Facebook the moment I picked up my phone to check the time.
 I would post a picture on Instagram and ten minutes later think, "I wonder if anyone has commented on FB about how cute this picture is yet..."
I would go to open Facebook, and it would be gone.
 It felt strange, but liberating. It didn't matter what anyone on Facebook was doing. I was free!
A few nights ago, Travis was reading some dumb BuzzFeed list of stupid texts and chuckling to himself. He handed me his phone and I scrolled through the screenshots. Then I back-arrowed, and found myself on his newsfeed. Without thinking or realizing what I was doing, I started scrolling.

I came to my senses ten minutes later as I came across an idiotic question on an idiotic quiz that I was mindlessly taking.
 The quiz was called "What country does your subconscious belong to?" Which is nonsense. Obviously, the quiz maker doesn't know what the subconscious is and only has a basic understanding of the English language, since the questions were things like "What would your favorite food be? Shrimp on the barbi? Pasta? Sushi?" 
(Hmm. What country should I choose? Australia, Italy, or Japan?) 
And then I got to the question, "Your favorite music. What whould it be?"
In the list of genres that weren't even real, was included "Yodel Music."
"Oh my gosh," I said to Travis. "Who is this freaking dumb? This is a quiz for and by idiots."
And then I remembered that the idiot taking the quiz- was me.
And apparently my subconscious is German.

And now I'm clean again for three days.
It feels like an addiction meeting.
It has been three days since my last mindless Facebook hit. It has been eight days since I deactivated my account. 
I can do this. I can. I will! I don't need to move to the woods to get away, I just needed to get rid of my Facebook.

 So far, so good.