Ultimately it was because of a blanket. Some potential Christmas present that I googled for reference, only to be reminded that bedding is really, super expensive. I logged into Facebook to send a message from my phone and there it was, an ad for Boll & Branch Bedding and Luxury Sheets. And that’s it. The build up of months and months of neglect, or not liking or commenting, by the overwhelming amount of shitposting and the thing to finally send me over the edge was an advertisement for blankets. Why? Why would I allow a bedding company to finally send me over the edge? Allow me to backtrack.

“I’m thinking about deleting my account,” I told my friends sometime in college. “But why?” was the usual response. The reasoning then was because I was bored of Facebook. Nothing new and exciting was happening anymore. I was almost exclusively using it as an entertainment device and to keep in touch with my friends, and ultimately it offered no entertainment value and my friendships weren’t bettered for it. But the ever impending account deletion never… impended. So for months I was still saying things like “I’m thinking about deleting it,” with no actual results.

“I really mean it this time, I’m going to do it,” was another phrase that had managed to pop up a few times, with my friends absentmindedly nodding their heads in agreement. Even despite these empty threats I still allowed Facebook to have a certain control over my life. The childlike need for validation was something that pervaded my every thought. Actions outside my keyboard and monitor were permeated with the idea of “Will this get noticed?” Which is a good thought to have if you’re targeting a certain audience instead of those jags from high school.

I wouldn’t say that Facebook was a huge distraction in my life but it was a prevailing presence everywhere. It was practically locked into the the first position tab in Chrome, it was in my pocket at all times, it was crying out to be notice with every ping of my phone. The monster of addiction, a ravenous hydra sprouting heads for any moment fed to it. I won’t say I was entirely enthralled, but it did manage to have a degree of power over me, that I let it have. It didn’t affect my school work, it never affected my jobs, but me, in an asomatous sense, was being ruined.

I started posting less. The funny quips and observations I would post instead were kept to myself. There were always mine of course, little pieces of me that I had released into the wild for all the wrong reasons. I stopped accepting friend request, started denying people more, started eliminating people from my life, the ones that didn’t matter to me as much. Then I started looking at it less, started removing tags from posts, and removing myself slowly from pages. Every click of detachment entailed catharsis. But it wasn’t enough. All of these were small actions that would inevitably reel me back in, something more extreme had to be done. I couldn’t just leave the congregation, I had to burn the church down and salt the earth in my wake.

If I was going to commit social-media-suicide I couldn’t do it by cutting off friends and enablers, it had to be far more personal, something that wouldn’t ensure my return. I see it happen all the time, people attempt to break Facebook’s hold only to come back over and over again, unwilling to admit that the relationship they were having with their social media presence may just be abusive.

Now, Facebook does have a delete option, but I trust it about as much as Zuckerberg donating to charity (not that charitable trust bull he believes is an appropriate substitute). It made perfect sense, really. I wanted to scrape myself off the site, not just delete my account and hope that all my information goes down with me (it wouldn’t anyway, market research is just too valuable to get rid of), but this was for my own piece of mind.

It could not have been easier, and it was pretty satisfying to watch. Fifteen seconds and a Chrome extension later and that tab that was seemingly locked into my browser bar was now progressing my destruction. I saw posts and distant memories eaten up and gone one by one. Removing myself from their servers, hopefully taking away my contributions to their ad research. It was as small rebellion, the digital variant of sticking it to the man. The chances are high that it meant absolutely nothing, but it felt good.

Six years, the span of time between high school and college and thereafter, was gone. The important bits were still with me, the things I could remember at least, but the historian of my less-than formative years was dead. You won’t find me anymore. All the energy that I had poured into recreating myself in an online presence, into retaining/ relationships that didn’t matter anymore, wasn’t worth it. 

The instant repentance that I thought would wash over me didn’t come. Instead it was indifference, followed closely by appeasement, then nothing. Much less of a bang, almost entirely a whimper, which left me with a should-have-done-this-sooner feeling.