Facebook purge.

Last month I quit Facebook and didn't tell anyone.
I think I had read one-too-many judgmental posts by mothers about other mothers.
People were hacking other people's accounts.
It's hard to read about five week old babies sleeping through the night when my 8-month-old hasn't shown any signs of making it more than five hours.

There were a million reasons Facebook wasn't making me feel good.  So I quit it.

I didn't tell anyone because I was sure I would go back in a day's time.  I had just spent the week before trying to convince the last person on the planet (my friend Heidi) to get a Facebook account. Checking Facebook was what I did every time I had a free moment, or even at times when I didn't have a free moment, but went to the site out of habit. It was such a huge part of my life that I was sure I would shrivel up and die without it.
It took a total of three minutes. From the time I asked myself, "Is all of this worth it?" to the time I deactivated my account and closed my computer.
I put absolutely no thought into why I was doing it until later. 
I became conscious that my blog would be read far less. But I was okay with that. I knew that some people would become less accessible.  But I have ways of finding emails, and I thought it might force me to write to them more.  I didn't want to miss out on photos people were posting, but I found that the people I craved photos from most, weren't posting very much.
What about everything else I would be missing?

I didn't miss it.  For the first week I felt this entire release.
The second week felt even better.
I couldn't believe how good it felt to be off the Facebook grid. I was never once even tempted to log back on - not once.
Until yesterday, when I accidentally logged on while trying to access my Pintrest. At the 1 month mark I had the first ebb of doubt spring into my mind. There were definite things I missed.
I missed tagging someone in a status update that I'd knew they'd appreciate, and then having our mutual friends find the ironic humor in it.
I missed photographs and updates from our friends in Peoria.
I missed baby pictures and pregnancy pictures.
I missed knowing when our dear friends were on vacation, and how big their kids were getting.
I especially missed seeing what was going on with the volunteers we work with from all over the world.

Yesterday I missed Facebook.

And today I sit here with my finger on the login "trigger" trying to decide if I'm ready.  If I'm brave enough or patient enough to enter back into that world. It may be today. It may not.  I'm still unsure.

I am sure that with my return will come a new sense of how to use this social media in a way that will make me feel good or, at the very least, not bad. I'm now ready to use it carefully, and with a sense of how it will make others feel.

I honestly didn't think I'd be gone for so long.
But it was just so refreshing.