Wednesday, November 25, 2015 // The Statement 
7B

I 

walked into the second floor study room 
of the School of Education ready to do 
some research for a final paper I was 

writing; I had put myself in just the right 
mindset to sit down and finish a good por-
tion of work. Surveying the area, I found the 
seat of my choice: a table to myself tucked 
away in the far corner, facing the tall, leaded 
windows that reached all the way to the high 
ceilings, allowing the crisp evening light of 
spring to shower me as I eagerly delved into 
primary sources. My thoughts were like 
a jagged slab of marble, hard, strong and 
heavy, waiting to be chiseled into a softly 
nuanced sculpture.

I settled into my spot and breathed it all 

in. I brought out my computer and opened 
Facebook.

The magic was gone. I realized this about 

five minutes into empty-heartedly scroll-
ing through my news feed; each post I saw 
acted not as the careful tap of a chisel but 
as a hammer’s blow. My thoughts were tiny 
pebbles chaotically, helplessly scattered on 
the floor.

I had had enough. For a while I had fanta-

sized about deleting my Facebook, which my 
best friend from back home, Madi, bravely 
had done during our junior year of high 
school.

“I felt like it was taking over my life,” she 

told me when I e-mailed her about writing 
this article. “I felt addicted to checking it at 
least every hour.” It hit me then, also, that I 
spent at least five minutes on social media 
every time I sit down at my computer. That’s 
over an hour every week and almost forty 
hours over a school year spent mindlessly 
scrolling through my news feed — forty 
hours of what I saw then as wasted time I 
could have spent on schoolwork or simply 
daydreaming. 

What’s more is that the moments within 

those forty hours usually made me feel pret-
ty horrible. I became extremely pessimistic: 
posts from high school friends claiming to 
have found their “people,” posts from my 
friends at Michigan who seemed to have 
found better, cooler lives than I had, and any 
other posts you could think of seemed to me 
like purposeful attempts by others to shove 
their apparent happiness in my face — me, 
who was struggling through freshman year, 
trying to push my way through the massive 
undergraduate population in an effort to 
find my niche. What was wrong with me? 
Why couldn’t I find the perfect group of 
friends who understood me completely, who 
went with me to the perfect party with other 
perfect people whose portraits complement-
ed my perfect social media profile?

It’s exhausting to relive those thoughts 

as I write them, and I’m sure they’re just 
as exhausting to read. They were certainly 
exhausting to experience; I realized during 
that moment in the School of Education how 
unnecessary it was to put myself through 
that. Facebook seemed to be the place where 
all of my anxieties manifested themselves, 
and so the only solution for me seemed to be 
to get rid of it.

I closed my computer screen and called 

my mom, with whom I’ve had countless con-

versations about the advantages and disad-
vantages of living in an age of such constant 
connectivity. I gave her a heads up that I was 
going to delete my profile — not deactivate, 
delete. As in, it would be gone forever.

So I did it. The deed was done. Five years 

of carefully curated photos, pages I’ve liked 
and groups I’ve joined gone forever, wiped 
from the record. I felt all at once liberated 
and breathless, like that feeling of getting a 
haircut and seeing too-long swaths of your 
hair lying on the ground, so impossibly 
detached from your head. Just like that, my 
Facebook, the most stylish accessory to my 
life, the force that legitimized my social rel-
evance was gone, impossibly detached like 
chopped locks of hair. Later Madi would tell 
me her experience was a similar one, that 
the decision to delete her Facebook was a 
sudden realization of what was right for her, 
and the emotion that immediately followed 
reflected this — it was one of arresting relief. 

“Deleting it wasn’t going to be the end of 

the world,” Madi told me. “Life would go on. 
And that was very empowering.” She’s right 
— not having a Facebook wasn’t a big deal as 
the excitement of life in Ann Arbor fizzled 
with everyone engulfed in final coursework. 
I had already made most of the friends I 
would that year, so Facebook wasn’t as rel-
evant to me then as it had been in the begin-
ning of freshman year.

It lacked importance in a similar way 

when I returned home to my old summer 
job for the summer, as I already knew most 
of my coworkers. Though I was working full 
time, most of my friends from home were 
gone for long periods of time, either on vaca-
tion or doing some kind of internship or 
study program. I had a lot of time to myself, 
which I filled by reading, journaling and 
exploring Columbus with our family’s old 
film camera. Not having Facebook was such 
a deliberate action that it influenced the 
way I saw my time. By purposefully omit-
ting from my life something that wasted so 
much time, I began to see each moment not 
as disposable but as a blank space character-
ized by myriad possibilities: did I want to 
fill it with wonder? Perplexity? Frustration? 
Vivacity? Serenity?

Despite 
good-hearted 
coaxing 
from 

coworkers to make a Facebook again, I fin-
ished the summer glad that I had stuck to my 
instincts and not submitted to external pres-
sures. Being Facebook-less allowed me to 
appreciate those moments in transition that 
we usually fill with social media blather. And 
even if I was “on my phone” for a moment, it 
would be reading an article on my news app 
or finding an obscure Instagram account 
(my admitted social media kryptonite).

It wasn’t until I settled back into univer-

sity life that I began to question my choice. 
I’m living in a single this semester and I’ve 
found I’ve had to be very deliberate about my 
social life. For this and other reasons, it just 
seemed like having a Facebook made sense. 
It would be practical.

One night I was feeling a similar impul-

sivity to what I felt that fateful evening in 
the School of Education. So far my new pro-
file tells me I have 262 friends.

Personal Statement: 
Crushing Facebook

ILLUSTRATION BY CHERYLL VICTUELLES

by Regan Detwiler, 
Daily Opinion Editor

