Filtered Honesty

When I first announced to all my Facebook friends that I was going to be leaving, no one around me could predict my reasons. I hadn't shown any signs of dissatisfaction with the Facebook world and I updated my status regularly, meaning once every day or two. My daughter was in phase where she was reliving her sixth grade year by taking a photo of whatever she was doing that day, sending it to me, and then I would post it on Facebook and tag her sixth grade teacher in it with the opening line of "Happy Summer Mr. "sixth grade teacher's name" with some kind of description to the photo taken. So there was a daily update from our family and then all of a sudden I post this.....

July 17, 2014
   I wanted to let you all know that I am going to begin a LONG process of deactivating my facebook. I want to stop the cycle of them gaining info from my profile and to do so, I am going to eventually unlike all the pages I have liked and eventually "unfriend" everyone I am friends with on here. Because deactivating my account does not erase the digital connections the internet makes, erasing everything is the only way to effectively free myself from facebook. This will take some time, I am not leaving immediately so if you want get my contact info please message me and hopefully we will continue to speak to each other in real life I will continue to post for the rest of the summer, and then I will start the new school year in a more present way to those around me. There are so many things that I don't really talk about on here, and I know many of you pick and choose the things you share, I do not want to live in that kind of "filtered honesty" and I look forward to engaging with less people in a more meaningful way. Love you all, and thank you for being my friends Know that when the time comes and I am not your friend on facebook anymore, it does not reflect anything about our real friendship in the actual world.

At this time, I had 450+ friends, more than the average friend list of people my age, but nothing to brag about. A whopping 30 people liked the status and I received a few comments from those supporting my decision. There were a couple comments showing concern for me leaving, either not wanting to lose contact, or wanting to know the dirty details for what stimulated my decision. 

And while my reasons stated above were accurate to a degree, there obviously had to be a tipping point to make me finally act on the thoughts that I publicly shared.

You see, Facebook filters the updates I see on my newsfeed. It takes the top 50ish people I interact with, those people whose statuses I like, comment on, and personal pages I visit, and that is who shows up on my newsfeed. Likewise, my status updates and pictures only show up on my friends' newsfeeds if they like, comment on, or hover over my statuses as they read them. So while I can say that I had 450+ friends at that time, I really only knew what about 50 of them were sharing on Facebook. Because let's face it, I am lazy and don't often visit my friends' personal pages because I am only on Facebook to get a quick update before I go on to the real reason I am online in the first place...I.E. looking for an email, or a recipe, or something on Pinterest to drool over.

So while I was staying on Facebook to stay connected to people who I had moved away from, or had moved away from me, or who I was only acquaintances with anyways.....I really had no idea what was going on with MANY of the people I thought I knew. I was relying on what Facebook showed me about people and more specifically what they GAVE Facebook to show me. 

 I realized that many of the people, who I thought I was close to, really did not share themselves openly online. They presented the pretty parts, the acceptable parts, the controlled parts of their lives, which is right and appropriate when you are sharing things with strangers who really don't know the real you. But many of these people I had considered close friends at one point. But since I had not talked to them in person for some time, I was assuming that everything I saw on Facebook was an accurate portrayal of the normal activities of their lives. Especially because I was in the middle of sharing a day to day account through our "Happy Summer" photos.

I lived in that "assumption" until I found out that my at-one-time-close friend was getting a divorce. Thankfully, I did not find out about it on Facebook, I found out through one of my kids who is friends with their kids--you see, they were TALKING on the phone, and it came up. My day stopped. I was shocked, I had no idea there was anything out of the ordinary going on in their lives. I had not seen any comment, feeling, or notion about such an event happening so I had been living with the assumption that nothing had changed. I was friends with both the husband and the wife and I never suspected anything could be less than what I had seen their marriage to be the entire time I had known them. Now, I will admit that I have no idea what their marriage was like in their home, but the updates, photos, and statuses had stayed the same since I had seen them last-a couple years ago. Which made me question why I was relying on Facebook to keep me connected to people when a true adult will not share the full reality of their lives on there anyways.

But this wake up to the reality of their stage of life made me acknowledge how I was not honest about my life either. I don't show everyone how I yell at my kids when I have asked them to pick up the living room and I am hungry and tired and take it out on them, I don't show them the pictures of my kitchen with the dishes balanced precariously in the sink. I don't brag about how many goals my son allowed in to the net as he watched the ball roll past him.....Facebook is for sharing the best things about ourselves so that people see the best parts of us. It's an attempt to make our second life online seem better than the one we are living in person. It's my pretend life if I got to ignore all the things I am ashamed of or disappointed by. So why would someone share so openly that the marriage that they thought would last forever, just ended? Why would I expect them to?

With my new understanding about the limited relationship I had with so many people, I just didn't want to waste my time with it anymore. I had had enough, but in an effort to protect my friend (who had not shared anything about the divorce openly on Facebook) I stated the above reasons. Even in my declaration that I was tired of filtering my life, I filtered my true reasons, out of protection for my friend, but also protection of myself.

I was ashamed that after years of being close with them when we lived in the same city, I so quickly had moved on. I had become satisfied with the vague updates and photos of their normal life. I had not talked to them on the phone, had not planned a visit. I had not continued the relationship after we moved away.  Hence, I was not part of the true friends who knew of the hardship they were experiencing. I had depended on Facebook to inform me of what was happening, and because I had trusted that information, I had not thought to connect on a deeper level. "I have no need to call, I know what's going on with them" Everything is just as I left it......or so I thought. I had believed the filtered honesty and found I was guilty of it myself.

When I have conversations on the phone, or in person, with one of my friends there are things that come out of the conversation that never would have been shared on Facebook, or text, or email. There is something so meaningful in true human contact. It is honest and raw, with tears and laughter. We speak in a pace that is natural. We listen and can hear the emotion in our voices. I am no longer satisfied with the pretend relationship of online communities. I want to NOT know what is going on in my friends' lives day to day, because then maybe I will MISS them and WANT to know what is new with them. Then I will call them and set up a coffee date and talk with them for hours about the little things in our family. The funny things, and hard things, the schedules and the teenagers, the recipes and the crafts. There is so much more than what I would ever tell you in a status update and I want to know more than what has filtered through the newsfeed.

Tonight's coffee: the leftovers from the 4 o'clock pot. So the cup is half as full with extra cream to fill it a bit more, but then less sugar because it already has more cream....