I make the same New Year’s resolution each year: to enjoy life more. But last year, I took myself to task. I identified something that was making me unhappy, and I pulled the plug on it.

I quit Facebook on January 1, after being on the Network for ten years.

Ten. Years.

How much time did I waste, scrolling numbly through my Newsfeed? I don’t want to think about it. I can’t.

Last spring, Zuckerberg remembered our anniversary, and sent me a cute little slideshow about ‘the way we were.’ I didn’t remember our anniversary, which, looking back, was probably a sign that our relationship was going down the toilet.

I’d heard about the demands social media places on our time, our emotions; how these medias can be overwhelming, even addicting. I’d read about how people were being cyber-bullied. Facebook was ruining marriages, giving people eating disorders, and something called “FOMO.” Some folks had even taken to co-sleeping with their devices.

On some level, I think I understood that social media was stealing the moment out from under us, reducing our days to screen-shots (it’s hard to fully live the experience of being at a concert, for instance, when you’re recording that concert on your smartphone), but it took some time for me to admit that social media was diminishing the quality of my life specifically.

I was talking to entrepreneur Ji Baek (who is a wizard at using social media) the other day, complaining about the pressures of being part of ‘Generation Like.’ She said I had no choice but to participate. “You’ve got to get in the car,” she said. “It’s moving whether or not you’re in it.”

And so, here I am, here we are, online, searching, reaching, connecting, looking for community and an audience; for sense and meaning and solace. Looking for experiences that mirror our own, and those that don’t. We are searching for something that matters. For authenticity. Which is why it’s strange that often what we show each other online is anything but.

It is a construction: a paper-house we carefully glue together, scaffold and display then spend all this energy trying to uphold and maintain. Such a waste as all those selves, the ones beaming back at us from behind the screen, aren’t actually us.

We are more, and sometimes less, than the sum of our status updates.

Over those ten years, with each picture I posted on Facebook (and Instagram, I should add), I was making a statement about who I was, and wasn’t; about what I stood for. And while in theory, there was nothing wrong with this, in practice it was complicated by the fact that I wasn’t going it alone. This wasn’t like I was writing in my diary or scrapbooking: trying to document, or make sense of my world for myself.

Facebook and Instagram are public enterprises. They are driven by images, mostly; by pageantry, beauty, youth, glitter. The stories we tell through them aren’t told in a vacuum. Others can weigh in on the narratives we spin. They can participate. They can judge and because they can judge, I would never have dared to post an unflattering picture of myself, braless and with a unibrow, air guitaring to Queen (which is something I never do). I wouldn’t mention that I had just burst into heaving, unnatural sobs over a parking ticket. Never. Online Me is reliably pleasant and witty and deeply concerned about human rights. She has her stuff together.

It might seem like people’s online selves are confident, and not in need of assurance. But, in fact, all they are doing is crying out to be seen.

A mentor of mine once told me that in the mind, self-image sits very close to self-esteem. They warm the same mental bench. What you put out there is assessed by others and, because of that, it matters to you. So you construct. You compete. Consciously or not, you manipulate the truth.

Of course, there are people who are centered and transparent and moderate in the ways they engage with technology. Social media Buddhas, I call them.

But I am not one of those people.

Facebook used to make it seem as if my past was never really gone. It was always just a few clicks away, at my fingertips. And so my identity risked settling there: stuck, rooted in comfortable moments that had long expired.

I’ve seen others struggle with these sorts of things, too. An acquaintance feuds openly with her sister-in-law through social media. My good friend has spent years — years — obsessively Facebook-stalking her ex-boyfriend. Two years ago, another friend reconnected with an old flame, a complete loser, and it almost cost her her marriage. She and her husband have three kids together.

For me, things weren’t that dramatic, but still, around Christmastime last year, I was reaching an internal tipping point. Christmas Eve, I hopped on the elliptical in my apartment, with a paper-copy of Vogue magazine. Sienna Miller was on the cover. The interviewer asked Miller why she wasn’t on social media. She had tried it once, Miller said, but found that it was fueling the “worst part” of her soul.

“It was the most addictive thing,” she said. “…I’d be inflated by this nonexistent, intangible love. I was like, ‘I need to get off this’.” So she quit after five days (“shorter than a Liz Taylor marriage!”), and hasn’t been back since. “It leaves you feeling incredibly lonely,” she said. “I know friends who are prolific on social media, and it gives them a lot of anxiety.”

I read that, and paused the machine. Had I even seen a Sienna Miller movie before? I dog-eared the page, and tried to recall an instance where being on Facebook had improved my mood. I couldn’t think of one.

By New Year’s Eve, I was ready to take the plunge. By then, I had acknowledged that there was a difference between ‘self’ and ‘selfie.’ A small difference — just two letters! — but a profound one. If I could delete the two letters, delete my constructed online false-self, I might be able to change the focus of my life; to enjoy the goddamn latte, instead of photographing it.

Attention drives perception, that’s what they say at least. Well, what if I took my attention away from the screen, and back into the world? Could I live with purpose, renewed?

Last spring, I celebrated my birthday. I remember, back in December, when I first started considering a life without social media, I worried I might miss all the birthday-attention, the Facebook-love I would have to forfeit as a defector. But the day came and went, and I didn’t think about that at all. In fact, social media didn’t cross my mind, not even once. I was instead, surrounded by the people who mean the most to me in the world, knee-deep in cake and belly-laughs — all of us alive, not in pixels, but in magical, vibrant, living color.