I am here to report that quitting Facebook is as difficult as quitting smoking. I haven’t had a cigarette in 12 years, but I recognize this bullshit: the vow, the reconsideration, the half-measures, the baby steps. I quit smoking about 300 times before it stuck, and it took something bigger than me to do that. With smokes, it was my beautiful cat Jack dying of cancer (he did not smoke). His protracted illness pushed me to full-time smoking again, a major step back, and I told my partner “I need this, one more time. Let me smoke until it’s over, and I’ll stop forever.” I smoked my last butt as I cried and buried my boy in the backyard. And that was it.

Facebook was just entering my life around then. I was suspicious of it, but liked the idea of being findable, easily, by former students and old enemies. I bought into it, really, when my good friend Derek died suddenly: the collective mourning (he was very loved) happened on Facebook - the sharing of memories and coordination of memorials - and it was very powerful. “This is something real,” I thought, and mostly surrendered.

It was never an easy relationship, but it was very full. I did in fact regain contact with old friends and students, and restarted relationships with family I didn’t see offline. I don’t remember when FB started to really sour, but it did, as we all know, and I tried leaving - for a year at one point. It was important in both causing and grieving the sham presidency of *45. It was important to me in allowing a forum to share the comics I was making - for a time FB was the only place I was publishing them.

But it has sucked for a while. At one point, inspired by Hank Green’s “it’s a baby” post, I thought I should stick with it and watch it evolve into its next phase. But as friends have either left the platform or gone silent, I have found it both empty and irritating - and, with Fuckerberg’s obnoxious dodging of scrutiny by changing its name to Meta, gross.

I still kept going - but last week a stubborn battle that has been rolling for years came to a head: Facebook continually asking me for my phone number “for my own security” had been pissing me off for years, but I just ignored it. Now they’re sending me notes telling me I’ll lose access if I don’t comply. To be clear: my phone number is NOT a secret. It’s all over the place. But the strong-arming, and the lying about why - they turned out to be the last straw. I’m going to not comply, and I will be locked out until I comply, on May 19th.

It’s good. I needed something to push me off. I don’t like moral grey areas - I like to take stands - and facebook made everything grey. I am taking the same opportunity to leave Twitter, and to at least temporarily stop reading the news. (I will keep Insta if they don’t force my hand there - I am not addicted to it, and do still think it’s a positive space.) I want to wake up in the morning and just be, and decide for myself what I will pay attention to.

I’m posting my email and phone and address in my FB profile banner, so that if anyone really needs to reach me, they’ll be able to. I don’t know what will come next. I miss Web 1.0, to be honest. I miss a lot of stuff. But I’m really, really genuinely tired of having antagonistic relationships with companies and products that seem to hate me - Mac, FB, google. I want to withdraw, as much as possible.

I’m not posting this on Facebook - I don’t care to hear the mocking that comes with that. I’ll join the next good, well-populated, non-sociopathic social media phenomenon, after a good period of watching other people try it. Mostly I hope to spend more time reading. :)