Finding refuge away from Facebook.

Deactivating my Facebook for a while.

I’ve had Facebook since I was 11. Now, that’s a pretty long time to have be on social media. I think Facebook was the very first social media that I ever had. I think we all kind of started out with Facebook.

I remember when I was 13, one girl at school that I wasn’t exactly best friends with sent me a message. The message read “Will you please like my profile pic?” I was confused.

I mean, sure I definitely could like her profile picture but why would I? It wasn’t like I was very close with her. We were literally just Facebook aquaintances. What was she looking for that led her to send messages to near-strangers? Anyhow, I still liked her picture.

When I was 13, I didn’t understand the addictive nature of social media and gaining validation online. Now I do. I think it started around when I was a sophomore in high school, when I started to build this “professional persona” around me via Facebook. If you clicked on my profile, you could immediately see the school that I go to alongside with 5 different jobs that I ran. (Not actual 9 to 5 of course, how could I do five 9 to 5's?) In my featured photos, I put in pictures like “Love Trumps Hate” and pictures from my most accomplished moments. It was like I was a a career woman built for success. And people thought so as well. It was like “failure” could no longer be a part of me. And that partly had to do with that fact that I didn’t let myself fail with this persona. It had to be success after success after success.

And that kind of persona isa lot to live up to. Now that I’m a senior in high school, the pressure of college admissions is upon me, which is considered the biggest and the most important moment of your life according to Korean standards. It is extremely important that you got in the top three schools here or else you were kind of, well, meh. Apparently.

Now, despite the professional persona I had built around myself, I didn’t have the guarantee nor the confidence that I would get into one of the top 3 schools. I wasn’t failing school, but I certainly wasn’t aceing it. Do you know how difficult it is to ace in a preppy private school? It’s very difficult.

I hadn’t let my scores define my worthiness for a while now but it was getting difficult not to do so at this point of my life, where my scores were crucial to my admissions. It was as if I were reduced down to mere numbers. And that really affected my self-esteem.

So much that I could no longer bear all of these “happy posts” on Facebook. So many upperclassmen who went to these top schools were now posting on Facebook about their oh-so-awesome college life and it was excruciating on my part. Also, I continued to keep up that professional persona around me because I had to. It was what I designated myself to do and I was built around that design. And as the number of likes increased, the more I seeked for validation and the more afraid I became at not being able to gain it.

So after a while of mild depression, I decided to deactivate my Facebook account. And it’s thus far been one of my better moves. I deleted the app, took it out of my favourites bar, and let it all go. Needless to say, the dopamine rush that came with the validation was terribly missed for a while. I found myself unconsciously turning on my phone to check for validation.

I couldn’t bear myself to delete it. Not with all of my friends on there and all of my memories woven into the Timeline. (One of Facebook’s best assets in my opinion — memories) But I did let myself deactivate it, and although I am having a hard time putting my mind off the “where did you go to college” notification from Facebook telling me to update my bio, I was able to at least escape it for a while. This was pure escapism. It was not making a stand and it was not making some sort of a statement. This was just me, trying to escape and find refuge from the maliciousness that Facebook can sometimes have.

Since when did we have to start finding refuge away from social media? I don’t know.