Untangling Facebook

In my early and mid-twenties, I spent a lot of time walking around at night. Partly it was to get space from the terrible relationship I was in, and partly it was just because I liked walking. I had moved across the country from a big city to a small town to be with my soon-to-be ex-girlfriend. We continued to live together in a 250 sq ft studio for several years, each of us feeling stuck and isolated. Every night I would climb up and down hills in my neighborhood, stroll around the hospital, roam through the park and over the creek. I listened to music and imagined I was the folk star singing. I replayed conversations in my head. I thought through essays.

Before smartphones, I would print the pages I was working on and carry them around with me on my walk, sometimes reading and walking at the same time, hunting out a well-lit street so I could see the text or find a bench to focus. I printed out emails sometimes too — long ones I’d sent to a pen pal or my therapist. I’d read them, and then start over and read them again, savoring the story I’d gotten down or their response.

I remember the first evening I owned a smartphone. Before I left the house, I carefully opened the piece I was working on while I had WIFI. Fifteen minutes later I sat blissed out on a park swing, smoking a cigarette, reading and re-reading my essay. What a marvel to have my work so close at hand (and backlit!). It’s a little embarrassing to admit how much I enjoyed reading my own writing then.

But it’s not nearly as embarrassing as admitting how much time I spend on Facebook now, often doing essentially the same thing, except with it somehow feeling much worse. I share my old walking practice to show you that I’ve always been a little obsessive about my writing. For years, rereading my journaling and correspondence has been an important and gratifying part of my writing process. Now, I find myself in a similar pattern, re-reading my posts on Facebook, looking for likes, re-reading a comment a dozen times, closing Facebook and then within the same breath unconsciously opening it again. Instead of propelling my creative process, though, I feel the emptiness that is endemic to social media — the deadness of the endless scroll, the distrust that this form of validation really means anything, the shame that I’m paying attention to this platform at all.

I got a Facebook account the summer after high school, when it still required a college email address. I created a profile with my hampshire.edu address, not really understanding what it was for. When my mother asked me about it, I explained Facebook was a website where you could see photos of the other students in your class.

I had arrived at Hampshire College along with one friend I knew from high school. Ryan and I went our separate ways, but it was reassuring to know he was nearby. One night during that first fall, we hung out on a couch together in an older student’s campus apartment. The pot-smoking twenty-somethings were a little much for us, and Ryan pulled out his laptop. We clicked around, looking at students’ profiles on Facebook.

“Are you seriously looking at FACEBOOK?” a neo-beat poet sneered.

Ryan and I blanched, caught in what I now realized was an indecent act. How revealing of our inner vacuity to spend time nosing in other people’s lives. On a radical liberal arts campus in the mid-aughts, looking at Facebook was the equivalent of revealing yourself to be a gossipy, Teen Beat-reading airhead. Facebook was for “popular kids” — generally not those of us who had chosen to go to a hippie school with no majors or grades. We snapped the laptop shut.

I still feel that heat of shame about spending time on Facebook. The people I’m closest to are all a decade or two older than me and have rich non-digital lives. Neither my partner nor my best friend use Facebook, and when either of them walk by, I instinctively command-tab to hide the Facebook window open on my computer. They know how much I struggle with minimizing my use and I feel guilty every time I’m caught in the act. I’ve tried website blockers, scheduling specific times to use it, and I’ve deleted the app countless times only to re-download it hours later.

The whole cycle feels extremely similar to how I used to be with cigarettes. In my years of trying to quit, I was the kind of smoker who, after a chain-smoking-induced migraine, soaked my cigarettes in water before throwing them out — otherwise, I would go through the trash. How I ultimately quit smoking involved lots of intensive journaling. So, here we are again.

One of the things that quitting smoking taught me was that listing all the things that are terrible about cigarettes isn’t all that helpful. A better approach was investigating everything about smoking that gave me pleasure: the heavy weight of a lighter in my pocket, the surge of clarity on a crisp autumn day, the warmth of pulling smoke deep into my lungs and exhaling it like a dragon. Smoking gave me a delicious escape from being around people and acted as a profound recommitment to my own boundaries. It helped anchor me inside my own skin. It was a sexy and meaningful ritual passed down to me by generations of dykes.

Facebook is not sexy. But it is most certainly pleasurable. What do I like about it?

I like that I get to find out what my high school English teacher is watching on television. I like knowing how my friends’ gardens are coming along and seeing what they had for dinner and what it means to them that they started testosterone ten years ago today. I like scoping out colleagues before we meet. I like the familiar rhythm of posts: cute animal video, meaningful anecdote from favorite author, interesting article I’ll maybe read later. I like following what’s going on in Deaf community and my professional sphere. I’m an ASL interpreter and Facebook is largely how I learn about Deaf/interpreting politics. I’m exhausted by the online queer community these days, but I feel the same delight knowing the inside scoop. I like the access to community Facebook provides and how it can redirect my attention when I’m feeling uncomfortable.

And I like the “likes.” For all the psychological turmoil the like button has introduced, it is nonetheless a marvel. When I post something, I can experience my connection to people from the entire course of my life. Out of nowhere, an alert pops up reminding me that I am still connected to my first lover, my tattoo artist, professors from college, my childhood neighbor, colleagues I met at a conference, my exes’ beloved exes, mentors I cherish. When they like something of mine, they are all in some peripheral way, thinking about me — expressing fondness for me. I can see it happening in real time. It is, in the scheme of things, an otherworldly experience, made banal through its frequency.

It’s a power I try to wield gently. I don’t post often, and when I do, I’m not always clear about my motivations. Sometimes I’m actively seeking connection and other times I just have an impulse to share with the world. Here are these neat shoelaces I bought. I learned something new about bookbinding.

It’s hardest, and maybe the best, when I do share something personal. In general, I’m a very private writer. I’ve written a lot about queer sex and the messiness of gender, and almost all my essays and stories are published under pen names. Typically, when a piece gets published in an anthology, I tell all of three or four people.

The amount of attention I can get on Facebook short-circuits my brain. I can write a paragraph — a half-thought, some stray childhood memory — and dozens of people tell me they like it. The dopamine hit positively floors me. My day is both made and ruined by the flood of likes.

And I’m small potatoes. On Facebook, with my 335 friends, I can get 50 or maybe 100 likes. I have no clue what people experience with large social media followings. I’m a basket case with 335 Facebook friends; I have no desire to test deeper waters.

How can I live with this technology? That is the question I’ve been stumbling to answer for the last several years as the positive attributes have increasingly been choked out. It’s wonderful that I can get soul-affirming praise about something I wrote. But it also often means I “blow my load” for a larger essay on the same topic. It’s the age-old writer’s dilemma: talking about your writing or sharing a draft too early can deplete the creative juice you have to actually write the damn thing. Facebook is an ideal medium for wasting your load.

There’s also the compulsive scrolling. I want to do a better job of owning and honoring the beautiful things Facebook has given me, but a lot of Facebook isn’t beautiful. It’s a nervous habit, a default icon-click to fill a quiet moment. It’s a flood of information, advertising, and over-stimulation that doesn’t leave me feeling good. I miss books and boredom and a pre-smart phone world. The pace of social media does not suit me at all.

I could be bold and delete my account, prioritize that quiet over the real and imagined benefits of being on Facebook. Maybe I will — it’s certainly not the worst idea I’ve had.

When I was serious about quitting smoking, I started working with a wonderful therapist, Carolyn, who was an addiction specialist. We spent months building rapport, establishing the relationship. I got comfortable revealing myself and felt respected and cared for. One day after smoking when I said I wasn’t going to, I came into Carolyn’s office embarrassed. Carolyn’s gentleness encouraged me to try something new.

“Can I show you my cigarettes?” I asked.

She nodded and I scooted onto the carpet cross-legged, like it was time for show and tell.

I pulled out my sleek metal cigarette case and opened it to reveal the twelve neatly arranged cigarettes, two missing from my earlier smoke.

I looked up at her bashful and she smiled.

“These are my cigarettes,” I explained. “I like how they’re lined up like little soldiers.”

“What do they smell like?” Carolyn asked.

I pulled one up to my nose and gave another to Carolyn to smell.

“Dried leaves, paper, autumn.”

Carolyn handed me a piece of printer paper and I broke one open so the tobacco spilled out onto the page. I dipped my pinky into the tobacco and tasted it.

“Dried leaves.”

“Dried leaves,” Carolyn affirmed.

For years, smoking had been my secret pleasure. In privacy, it became increasingly loaded and shame ridden. But in the lamplight of Carolyn’s office, cigarettes took on their more earthly form. Something you could easily hold in your hand and talk about.

I want to talk about Facebook in hopes that I can shake loose some of its charge. A cigarette is a bunch of dried leaves in the same way that Facebook is a big, complicated website. It’s awfully hard to use either in a sane way. They’re complex, mind-altering devices that are very much a part of the human experience. If you’re a smoker or a social media user, it’s hard to imagine a reality without grabbing for them when they’re easily within reach.

I don’t know if I can have a healthy relationship with Facebook. In my ideal world I would use it to learn what’s going on with my friends, read good essays, and occasionally share an update from my basecamp. I’d go days or weeks without opening it because I’d be fully immersed in the rest of my life: boredom, bliss, and all. I want to be able to enjoy the magical connections social media brings and I can’t have that little notification bubble constantly clanging off in my head. So, here is my official announcement that I’m taking a break from Facebook to better figure this out. My first step: writing it in a 2000-word essay instead of a Facebook post.