The Mourning from the Unfriending

Saying Goodbye on Facebook and Twitter

It’s an incredibly hard thing to say goodbye to someone. I don’t mean that last moment at the airport gate, or the train terminal. I mean to make the choice to digitally, and thus in real life, to say goodbye. To unfollow and unfriend. To make the choice — as much as you believe it to be for the best — that you will never see that person again.

I’ve done that with hundreds of people in the last few months. Most were small and inconsequential. There were college and high school friends I have not really talked to since commencement. There were people I met at parties, significant others of friends no longer in the picture. That sort of thing. I went from 700 to about 200 Facebook friends. That was liberating. I felt free of digital jealousy. FOMO could kiss my ass.

Then, I cut my Friends down to 100, then to 40, and now to under 30. Some of those people were incredibly important to my life in times past. Many of those people hurt me by failing to make a symmetrical effort to mine to maintain the relationship. I thought to myself “if I don’t reach out, I’ll never see them again.” I got angry at them, and then sad, and then I said goodbye quietly. With the click of the mouse, and in some cases a polite email response regarding an unrelated matter, I disappeared from their life and from mine theirs.

I knew it would be the last time I would speak to them. I’d never see them again. And I think it was important for me to say goodbye to all of these people. The small, distant acquaintances, and the close influences of very recent memory that I felt could no longer be thought of as friends. I made the right choice to build a healthier emotional homeostasis, but I underestimated — I didn’t realize until now — how much of my life I was saying goodbye to when I said goodbye to them.

My spiritual body feels like it’s lost so much of its composition. In choosing to leave behind so many people who were a big part of my life, I’ve given away so much of the fleshy parts of my spirit. A human is truly nothing without social fabric; without relationships and empathy, and community, and the resilience that comes from others as well as from within one’s heart. I’m learning that now.

When you say goodbye to someone who had an effect on your life, you’re saying goodbye to a part of you, a part of your life. Yes, these goodbyes may be the result of important disruption. You could be growing into something different, something healthier and more capable than the person you were before. You could be saying goodbye to old relationships so that you can be better able to build new, more challenging and fulfilling ones.

And yet, when you say goodbye, you connect with pain and loss that is less-directly experienced than it was in the analog age. When you make an effort to say goodbye in our always connected modernity — when we collect followers and “friends” as political campaigns collect supporters — you connect with an important truth: We are born to change, to grow, and pain comes with growth.

How we change is as much about our bonds with others, as it is about internal changes. When we change for the better, we still must take time to mourn the loss of old ties. We are humans, enabled with the ability to reflect and grow; both gifted and burdened with hearts that define existence by connecting to other hearts.

And so, I mourn. It is odd — I have only one living grandparent left and this sorrow is different than a loved one passed on. Perhaps I don’t mourn my late Grandfather Jones because I can honor his Scottish heritage and embody his ethos, tearing up as the drone of a piper playing a waulking song channels my gate into what I remember as his.

What I know for sure is that my pain these past few months has been mourning. But, it’s good mourning. It’s a sign that growth is being made in my soul. Growth, it seems, is never without its own pains.