Breaking up with Facebook feels like ending a long term relationship.  I didn’t expect the emotional response that has grown since I decided to delete my account.

I have had good advice from people;

Keep it open so you can get invites, just don’t post there. 

Block the people whose posts are upsetting you. 

Visit it less often, limit yourself, etc. 

All good ideas. All good advice. However, Facebook has a cloying appeal, with one push of a mouse button I can waste hours of my time reading articles on the top ten worst drunk texts of 2014.

Am I disciplined enough to have an account and yet not push the mouse button? Is there a real risk I will miss important announcements, invitations, etc. if I do delete the account?

Will I miss friends who are far away? Will they miss me? Is there a value to Facebook that goes beyond what I am currently seeing?

Right now, Facebook is allowing me to be lazy in my relationships.  My caller ID on my phone puts the numbers I call most often in my SpeedDial. I have two family members, two friends, work, and clients on my speed dial. I don’t have the friends I live close to, for the most part, because I don’t call them. I don’t talk to them. Instead I follow their posts on Facebook and feel as though I have put in the work necessary to maintain a relationship. I haven’t, and neither have they.  We are coasting on a glossy surface of paragraph updates with a picture or two.  Where once we would sit over a cup of coffee and talk for hours about whatever came to mind we are now reduced to “like” buttons and one or two sentence comments. I find myself seeking likes in the same way I used to seek approval from high school peers.  It took years of self discipline to decide not to care about the people who didn’t care about me and to invest my time, instead, in those who did.  Facebook undermines that diligence, and worse most likely because of its own algorithms and not through the choices of those friends.  Facebook decides who sees what with a constantly changes series of equations.

In short, I need to get out more.

If I stay on Facebook, will my behaviors change? If I leave will my behaviors change or will these tenuous ties grow weaker, further reduced by not even following the small updates in my feed?

When did social media replace social interaction? Is this a necessary part of growing up? Are the distances there because they are natural? Am I blaming a social media platform for something that is a natural progression in life?

So many questions, so much obsession. All over a website.

It’s morning.

Yesterday they delivered my new bookshelf and I assembled it using an unreliable and irritating phillips head screwdriver I found in the evidence room.  I need to bring my own tool box into the office.

Anyhoo, I got the thing assembled.  It took less than half an hour and I happily placed it next to my filing cabinet and underneath the 67″ monitor I have hanging on the wall.

Today, I filled it partially with books. (Law books, as all law students know, are magically printed on super-thin delicate pages that somehow manage to weigh 47 tons each, resulting in hunchbacked lawyers across the nation.)  I carried in nearly a shelf full and happily arranged them.

Then I settled in with my cup of hot coffee and looked around my office.

Mine.

My space, with my door, that I can shut.

My chair.

My desk.

My books.

The high corner office hidden away from everyone else was hated by every other person it was given to. My boss had it, our ex-partner had it. Every single person despised being so far away from the hustle and bustle of the rest of the office.

I revel in the ability to shut a door and work in silence.  I read contracts and develop websites and research with no one walking past me, asking me questions, breaking my flow.  I sit in my isolation chamber with my hot coffee surrounded by pictures of prairie dogs, my kids, Dan, and me snuggling tigers. I relax, I sink in, I smile.

I am at home.

The new super-powered ibuprofen I was given seems to be bringing the shadowboxer down to a dull roar.  I am still oddly aware of the right side of my face, in that it feels slightly more electrical than the left side, but it’s not making me cry anymore, so Yay!!

In other news, I got a new job this week, which is wonderful and super exciting.  I will tell more details when I am actually plugging away at it.  I am also writing a book on Evidence.  So, that should be a fun combination of time consuming activities that require me to have a normal appearing life, along with the lowering in pain necessary to do it! So Yay!

So despite the dire sounding nature of the illness I have and the complete upheaval of my family by divorce, things are shining pretty over here for a change.