A grand exit-in-progress

Hi Friends,

Good morning and happy Friday! Thanks so much for being here. To those of you who are new, welcome. I am honored to be a small part of your day and I hope my words reach you in a meaningful way. My intention with Living Faithyfully is to hold myself accountable to keep writing and to weave threads of connection through shared feelings and experiences. So as you read today’s post or others, please feel free to reach out to me with any questions and reflections. I love hearing from you :)

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This morning I woke up to a text from a friend that made me laugh out loud. It read:

“Love your grand exit-in-progress from Facebook.” 🙈

As some of you may have seen, I’ve decided to exit the platform after 15 years. 15 years of sharing personal pictures, milestones and stories and 15 years of consuming the stories, news, and updates of those in my extended network of family, friends, and colleagues. On one hand, I’m just pressing a button, and on the other hand, I am intentionally closing a chapter.

To give you some perspective, 15 years ago it was 2006. I was 18 years old, living in my hometown of Charlotte, NC and about to head to college in Waltham, Massachusetts. George Bush was president and Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” was a top single of the year (yikes!) Now I’m 33, married, mom to three kiddos and have a decade of work and entrepreneurship behind me. In between I’ve lost loved ones including my father, fallen in love twice, traveled the world, watched family members suffer, had a miscarriage, and awoken to the many crises of our generation (climate change, systemic racism and financial injustice fueled by capitalism). I’ve finished college and graduate school, endured a life threatening car crash and Donald Trump’s presidency, co-founded a start up and made a life in Brooklyn, NY. Clearly, a lot can happen in 15 years and in many ways, I’ve chronicled much of that journey on Facebook. It is therefore with mixed emotions that I say good-bye to the picture wall/journal/news reel/echo chamber/time capsule that is Facebook…or should I say Meta?

Today, I’d like to share the journey of how I made this decision with you. (As you may know by now, I can be long winded and this journey is no exception, but I’ll hope you’ll stick it out with me through the end…)

My “grand-exit-in-progress” actually started three years ago when a dear friend sent me a book entitled How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, by Jenny Odell. Like the title implies, Odell argues that we should resist social media and technology platforms that have been built and monetized to grab our attention as long as possible (i.e. “the Attention Economy”). The book affirmed what I had been feeling for quite some time: the more social media I constructed and consumed, the less present I was for any of my experiences.

Odell ultimately believes that because the internet strips us of our sense of place and time, we can counter its force by re-situating ourselves within our physical environment, by becoming closer to the natural world.

This call to mindfulness, to reorienting ourselves to the ‘here and now,’ without reference to, or reservation about, how it might be captured through the curated lens of social media, felt like a call to liberation. After all, how many hours do we spend mindlessly scrolling on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or Twitter? How many times do we refresh our feeds to check the number of likes a post gets and how long do we scrutinize the language we use to express an idea? I started to fantasize: What if I just deleted all of it? What would I do with all my time? I started reading more literature in the “Digital Minimalist” genre, and like many others, I did very little to actually change my behavior. Still, the thought of shutting it all down sat gnawing at me.

And then one day, by mistake (or luck?), I got locked out of Instagram.

After a dozen failed attempts to recover my password (including one of those incredibly awkward pictures you send of yourself holding a sign with a code to some random developer at Facebook), I gave up. And then something amazing happened: absolutely nothing. After two weeks, my brain rewired and I stopped checking the app. After a month, it wasn’t even a kernel of thought.

Up until I got locked out I had really enjoyed Instagram, both posting and consuming content, so it shocked me that it felt as simple as closing a window of open tabs, or paying off a bill… it was just done, over, gone. I felt lighter and a little subversive saving the sweetest moments of my day, just for me. Time rolled on and I forgot how much time I used to spend on the app or why I liked it so much. Then a few weeks ago, something else happened. I was telling a very close friend about this experience and it became clear that she had no idea that I had been off instagram… for over a year. Imagine for one moment, how would that make you feel?

It’s hard to put into words, but right then and there I realized I had to get off Facebook as well.

What I realized in that moment is although I assumed my Instagram and Facebook experiences were about connecting and interacting with others, they really had just been about me.

It felt like waking up and realizing I was in a relationship with myself through a thousand mirrors. Even though I posted pictures of other people, liked other people’s content and commented/responded to other people’s offerings, at the end of the day, it was always just me, sitting with my i-phone in between my two thumbs, staring down at a screen for much longer than I planned or would ever like to admit.

And something about that just shook me.

That isn’t the person I want be – head down, staring at my phone when I have five minutes before a friend shows up for drink, or checking my feeds absentmindedly while my children ask for my attention. I definitely do not want to live in Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of Meta in which we’re all wearing VR headsets, using our digital avatar to interact with people and pretending like it’s anything close to real human connection.

I am not saying that you can’t learn or enjoy using social media platforms. God bless the people who have figured out how to curate their social media to a point where they aren’t a distraction, but rather an outlet for growth, fun and education. But that’s not me. And truthfully, is it you?

In this chapter of my life, my primary intention is presence. As a mom to three souls, as a partner devoted for a lifetime, as a mentor to younger women, and as a community builder and leader, I cannot afford to be distracted. I have so much to offer, and so much more to learn. For me, my use of social media had become either an act of either affirming and reproducing an idea of who I used to be in the past, or projecting an aspiration of who I want to be in the future. But neither of them come close to capturing the present – full of vibrancy and emotionality, paradox and energetic exchange. The present, fully felt, is also far more expansive than either the past (which is finite and known) or the future (which is bound by the constructs that bind us) can ever be.

So as I say goodbye to my chapter with social media as we know it, I’m excited. I’m excited to write a new story, to reclaim my free time and my head space, and to see what relationships emerge intact IRL. I’m ready to discover what is possible in relationships outside the confines of social media and I’m ready to be challenged to stay in touch with friends in more meaningful, if less frequent, ways. I’m hopeful this excitement will continue to fuel my curiosity and lead me to new interests. I know I’ll miss out on following friends' milestones and achievements – a real loss – but one I am prepared to live with in pursuit of a fuller daily lived experience.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend filled with moments that cannot be captured in words or images, only felt.

Until next week 🙏

Faith