Over the past several years, I’ve read many articles and anecdotes about deleting personal social media accounts. A quick Internet search reveals a panoply of links littered with triumphant tales of overcoming Facebook addictions and “moving on” from such online social fora. Some go as far as predicting a mass exodus from different social media outlets, citing as reasons boredom, problems with false senses of friendship, large amounts of wasted time, and a general dissatisfaction with the publication of mundane details of life that Facebook fosters. My experience may or may not be another one of those “I quit Facebook, and I am better for it”-type stories. I did, in fact, quit Facebook, but the jury is still out on whether or not I am better than the next person who still uses Facebook. I will admit that deleting Facebook and some 300 online friends, with whom communication was possible with a click of a button, was a huge sacrifice. However, it was a sacrifice that I was willing to make, and I had to make it to get back to my old self. And when I refer to my “old self,” I’m talking about my five-year-old self.

This story really begins on my first day of kindergarten, which was perhaps one of the most traumatic days of my childhood up to that point. I still remember it vividly, and even after more than two decades, I don’t blame myself for acting the way that I did. That’s the thing about me: I am very much the same person today that I was when I was little. I have certainly evolved on some issues and have received all sorts of education in the interim, but I retain many, if not all, of the same core values that I had when I was five. Among these, I maintain that people should be kind, people should play fair, and people should not be flakes.

On that fateful morning in the fall of 1993, I was already light years out of my comfort zone by being away from my parents and sister in a room full of strange children whom I was expected to befriend. So, when the teacher announced that she had two red rubber handballs available to check out for recess, I decided I would like to be in charge of one of them so that I would have some hope of fitting in. The other children would see me with the ball at recess and would ask me if they could play with me, and I would make friends. I had a plan. This kindergarten thing was going work out after all.

I thrust my hand in the air to volunteer myself as the temporary steward of the handball for the recess period. You’re doing it, Kasey, way to go, I thought to myself. Another classmate, a girl also named Kacey, requested the other handball. This was Kacey with a “C,” or “Girl Kacey,” as she later came to be known in our elementary school classes. Girl Kacey and I accepted our large, unwieldy handballs as we made our way out to enclosed recess area. As I stood on the blacktop, bouncing my ball alone, I thought to myself, Look at you. You are having fun. You are doing a good job at this. Keep it up. But when I looked around, I realized that I had been mistaken all along. All the other kids wanted to play on the swings and monkey bars and had no interest in playing with a stupid, oversized red ball. The wretched globe seemed to grow in size and became more ridiculous and unappealing with each passing moment, like an infected boil ready to burst. Within five minutes I realized the ball had made me even more of an outcast than I was when I first set foot into the classroom earlier that morning. I desperately wanted to rid myself of this red abomination, but I couldn’t. I had made a commitment to be its caretaker for the entire recess period. I was determined to carry out this duty, regardless of the impact it was going to have on my well-being. Besides, only flakes would neglect a self-assumed responsibility. And then I saw it: Girl Kacey’s handball was rolling aimlessly around the playground, abandoned and vulnerable. I was appalled.

At first I thought it was a mirage, but then I saw Girl Kacey merrily skipping around with other classmates, free of the oppressive burden that the handball had imposed on the both of us. I hastily made my way over to Girl Kacey and asked her, in my five-year-old vernacular, why the fuck she thought it was a good idea to so recklessly ditch her ball. She stated that she was simply tired of playing with it, and with that, turned around and made her way towards the seesaw. Still incredulous, I marched over to ball #2 and decided to watch over it for the remainder of the recess period, which I hoped would end soon. Unable to manage both handballs together, I carried one in my arms while lightly kicking the other in front of me. After a few revolutions, I became even more horrified when I noticed that Girl Kacey had dropped her ball in the mud. At this point, holding back tears, I trudged to the water fountain to try and clean the soiled ball as best as I could, but I knew it was useless. My teacher would see the dirty stain and would think it was my fault. I had failed. I was less than four hours in, but I officially declared kindergarten a disaster.

Upon seeing my mother after school, I leapt into her arms and sobbed. She asked my teacher what had happened, and my teacher shrugged with a puzzled look on her face. She said she didn’t understand why I was upset, since nothing appeared to go wrong during the day. After I calmed down at home, I sat Mom down for a meeting. I don’t remember telling her about the Girl Kacey fiasco, because even at that age, I knew it was silly to be upset over something like that, and all I ever wanted was for adults to take me seriously. I do remember, however, giving her the following proposition: “I don’t think I’m ready for kindergarten. Can we try again next year?”

So, this ostensibly has nothing to do with Facebook or why I quit, but it should at least give you a vague sense of who I am as a person. I’ve told the red ball story on dates and to coworkers, and perhaps even a few of my close friends are familiar with it. The bullet points most people take away from it are that I value commitment, I loathe the aforementioned flaky people, and that, by and large, it is and always has been difficult for me to make friends. I suppose this is because the need to have friends has never come from within myself. They say humans are social creatures and seek interaction with other humans by nature; however, I’m convinced that, had I never received this memo, I’d still be on my own somewhere. This isn’t to say that I don’t like the friends I have or that I’m not grateful for their meaningful contributions to my life–I am–it’s just that I wouldn’t have been so worked up about making friends or playing with that stupid fucking red handball on my first day of kindergarten had my parents not openly expressed their concern about my shy, reticent nature, and how it would affect my ability to relate to other children at school. I knew they were concerned, which is why I went out on a limb for them. I didn’t want friends for myself; in fact, at that age I didn’t have much use for friends. Instead, I wanted to be alone. I also wanted to be inconspicuous, but I learned with each passing school year that loners are quite a visible demographic. Faced with this paradoxical desire, I eventually learned how to forge relationships that approximated friendships and fooled most adults, namely my parents and teachers, into thinking that I didn’t suffer from social isolation. The reality was that I was still a loner and I was still bullied mercilessly, but for most of my childhood and early adolescence, there were at least two or three other bodies around me to act as a buffer zone. It wasn’t exactly a happy existence, but it allowed me to survive and still remain true to who I was. Other people had friends to rely on; I had myself. That’s the way things were until I entered high school.

Much to my surprise, and for whatever reason, the bullying and harassment ceased immediately upon entering high school. Academically, I was one of the highest achieving students in my graduating class, and I also was a stunningly mediocre cross-country runner. I even had a semi-consistent group of friends, and things felt comfortable. Overall, it felt great to finally occupy the seemingly elusive space between being anonymous without being too obvious. For the first time in many years, I experienced a happy social equilibrium.

Enter MySpace, which I first learned about when I was on a trip to Japan in 2004 with a group of American high school students from my hometown. On our tour bus one day, I heard two girls mourning that they would be leaving their MySpace accounts idle for the duration of the trip. When I asked them what they were talking about, they explained to me the basics of the website, such as the existence of a profile, the ability to post pictures, the addition and deletion of “friends,” etc. I thought it sounded dumb, but several months later, curiosity got the better of me and I created my first MySpace page. I was instantly hooked.

Now, this is where many people fail to understand just how revolutionary MySpace was, especially for people like me. Let me begin by saying that I believed that MySpace, when I first joined in 2004, was a way to level the social playing field. Just as those two girls on the bus in Japan said, MySpace gave you a profile: a space. Your space. You could decorate your space, or you could leave your space plain. You could post your witty thoughts on your space, or you could post your agonizingly personal teenage secrets on your space. You could even post awkward pictures of yourself on your space. But the best part about your space was that people could discover it. People could learn things about you from your space that they might not be able to learn in real life. In those days, the airspace on MySpace seemed plentiful. The amount of content wasn’t overwhelming and people (e.g., my teenage self and peers) had time to leave comments on friends’ pages and pictures. As my personal space on MySpace was carefully crafted, with regularly updated, cleverly staged photos and silly blog posts containing my musings about life, I consistently received positive feedback from strangers who stumbled upon my space from the pages of mutual friends. This was it. This is what was missing in my life. This was a way for people to get a glimpse on what went on inside my head. People might begin to “get” me. They could click on my page at random, whenever they wanted. They could leave comments or they could browse anonymously. The choice was theirs.

Unlike in real life, the choice to share information about oneself, and the corresponding choice to learn things about someone, were fairly easy to make on the Internet. In my experience, sharing about yourself online progressively became an easier alternative from 2004 to about 2007, at which time many people had already made the transition from MySpace to Facebook. Then it all became too easy, and things started to fall apart.

For me, my enjoyment of MySpace and Facebook began to break down when it became de facto knowledge that a person’s online profile was a proxy (albeit not always an accurate one) for a person’s real life. In my early days on social networking sites, I personally never understood that to be the case. I always had the idea that MySpace and Facebook profiles supplemented a person’s real life, but they did not duplicate a person’s real life. By 2008, Facebook had replaced MySpace as my friends’ social network of choice and essentially became Life 2.0. An example of this was the fact that Facebook allowed users to post albums upon albums of photos, whereas early MySpace limited users to about eight pictures. You may also remember when Facebook’s status update used to read as “Kasey is [fill-in-the-blank],” encouraging users to provide their networks of friends with details of daily minutiae, or vague, attention-seeking cliffhangers. MySpace circa 2004 had no such feature, but quickly adopted one as one of its many attempts to slow the crippling migration of users that eventually took place. What MySpace did have was the “bulletin” feature, which allowed users to share a message with all of their friends in a single click. In the early days, I thought this feature was to be shared and not abused; however, as real life violently converged with online social media presence, the airwaves became hopelessly crowded. The more MySpace and Facebook turned into “real life,” the more I had to compete for air time with loud or otherwise naturally social people, who really didn’t need the extra medium to communicate or be discovered. You might remember these people as those who would post several bulletins on MySpace in a row, begging for comments on pictures (“LeAvE me sOmE lOvE!!”) and replies to their blogs containing surveys and questionnaires. These same people were responsible for such Facebook status updates as “Ashley is waiting in line at Costco, UGH” and “Ryan is sick of it all! FML!” I used to appreciate MySpace and Facebook for allowing one to possibly scratch the surface of another person’s persona, but by 2008, accessing someone’s online profile immediately pulled you knee-deep into their drama. As far as I was concerned, MySpace and Facebook, as I once knew and loved them, were over. It was now too easy for people to profess the intimate details of their lives to unwilling listeners, and oversharing was the norm. I was less than thrilled.

Early on in my Facebook days, I recall seeing friends join the tongue-in-cheek group entitled something in the neighborhood of “If you’re not on Facebook, you don’t exist to me.” I realized that, by 2010, the group could have changed its name to “If you’re not on my news feed, you don’t exist to me.” When I still used Facebook, the highlight of the main page’s interface was, in fact, the news feed. Popular posts were rewarded with “likes” and a flurry of comments, and they would occupy temporary but valuable real estate on other users’ main pages: the top of the news feed. I remember that this space was often dominated by pictures of exotic vacations, graduations from academic programs, and pregnancy announcements. News items of a more trivial nature (puns, references to events in pop culture, etc.) were featured further down in the feed, and depending on the level of interest in a user’s audience, they would be lucky to receive a smattering of “likes” and comments. In the event that a person rarely updated their Facebook page, they would not appear in the news feed and their profile would only be accessible by affirmatively searching for it. However, as I mentioned before, by this point many people conflated Facebook with real life. No news from you might have been good news, or it could have been bad news. Either way, if you didn’t post your shit on your page, you were likely to be forgotten, or at the very least, overlooked.

I learned this the hard way, and I think it’s because people had (and still have) the idea that a person’s Facebook page is an accurate depiction of the goings-on in their real life. Even a study from Stanford University in 2011 revealed that this mass assumption leads Facebook users to compare their lives to the ones they witness through the status updates and album postings of their online friends. The Stanford study suggested that this may foment feelings of dejection and depression, especially if a person’s Facebook friends appear to be happy, healthy, and successful in their profiles. Though I had always maintained that a Facebook profile was a mere snapshot of a person’s life, even I would find myself playing endless rounds of “Whose Life is Better than Mine?” at the peak of my Facebook usage. (The answer? Everyone’s, of course.)

But to return to my earlier point, if a friend earnestly wanted to know what was happening in my life if they were unsatisfied with my absence from their news feed, the logical thing to do was to visit my profile. I imagine that, for the person viewing my profile, seeing my smiling face in my default picture and no recent updates from me was a sufficient sign that I was still alive and presumably happy. They knew what was really going on with me because, well, Look at how happy he looks! And there doesn’t seem to be any sign of tragedy on his page, so he must be doing great. Good for him.

I finally deleted my MySpace profile in April of 2008. At that time I was studying abroad and found myself feeling particularly lonely one night, and I became angry that I had these two platforms for talking to friends and family but had very little success anymore in actually getting people to respond to me. At that point, having two profiles that were becoming increasingly littered with everyone else’s crap was too overwhelming. The solution was clear, at least to me: I would make myself less available, and people would appreciate any remaining opportunity that they would have to communicate with me. And it worked, at least for a short while: friends noticed my absence on MySpace and were more attentive to me on Facebook. But the joke was on me, as I still strictly held people to the same unwritten rules of life that I valued when I was five: people should play fair, and people shouldn’t be flakes. As I seemed to be the only one following these rules, Facebook quickly devolved into a vortex of unattended, bouncing, filthy red handballs. This was due to, among other things, lazy, insincere birthday wishes from people I only heard from once a year (I immediately disabled Facebook from announcing my birthday after the first occasion); a news feed clogged with albums full of babies, pets, and squatting sorority girls drinking out of red plastic cups; uninformed political diatribes; etc. I was less than four years in, but I officially declared Facebook a disaster.

After college, I found myself living abroad again and begrudgingly maintained and relied on my Facebook profile to remain connected to friends and family in the United States. I had never heavily documented my life on Facebook anyway, and the fact that my life was once again being carried out in a foreign country was of no consequence. My time on Facebook was primarily dedicated to using the instant messaging feature to talk to friends and sometimes uploading the few photographs that I deemed worthy of sharing. I would also send close friends personal messages when I wanted to catch up with them via phone or webcam. I often wouldn’t receive responses until weeks later, but my friends’ activity on Facebook indicated that they were alive and capable of commenting on their other friends’ wedding albums and drunken status updates. Then I realized why I was being ignored: I fell off the news feed. Thus, what needled me most about Facebook was just how easy it was to get lost and forgotten under the massive weight of what appeared to be a collapsing black hole. My feeble attempts to reach out were being consumed by the tremendous amount of other, more attention-worthy Facebook content. In other words, just because my friends were on the other side of the blacktop didn’t mean that I couldn’t see them ignoring their stupid red handballs.

By requiring such a small amount of attention from the friends that I had, I thought I was doing them a favor; in retrospect, I may have been better off by bombarding my Facebook followers with intimate details of my life abroad, complete with an online diary and corresponding photographic chronology. But it just wasn’t my style, and despite my repeated attempts at reaching out to certain friends during the more desperate moments of my tenure abroad, I consistently received little to no response. At that point I realized Facebook had become a monstrosity of a playground, so in October of 2011, I calmly announced my decision to leave and left my email address and phone number to those who were interested in keeping in touch. In November, I picked up my handball, dusted it off, and quietly walked away for good. I permanently deleted my account, and I never looked back.

For me, there were few immediate consequences of leaving Facebook. The most obvious of them was the loss of contact with the nearly 300 “friends” I had added over the course of my time on Facebook, but I didn’t care too much about that. All I wanted was to get my closest friends (sans quotation marks) back into my life, which I did. A few of them even apologized for abusing the convenience of Facebook and for not responding to me when I needed them the most.

The other notable consequence of not having Facebook didn’t arise until my first year of law school, when I learned that most social events at school were publicized on Facebook event pages. I remember a conversation I had that year with an upperclassman about my absence from social media. He seemed confused about how I learned about when events were going to happen. I told him that if the event was important enough, I would likely hear about it some other way; if not, I probably wasn’t missing out on anything. Sure enough, this conversation took place at a law student pool party, which had I learned of through channels other than Facebook. Still, the other student frowned and scoffed, “Are you against having fun, or something?”

Another phenomenon I’ve noticed is how people react when I tell them I’m not on Facebook. I rarely volunteer this fact unprovoked; instead, the issue normally comes up when people want me to add them as a friend or look at something they’ve posted. When I tell them why I can’t, most people become defensive about their own Facebook usage:

“I only have it to keep in touch with people.”

“I’m hardly ever on there anyway.”

“I have to be on there because it’s convenient for my [elderly relative] to be able to talk to the whole family.”

Some people give me praise:

“Good for you, how did you do it?”

“That’s impressive!”

“I’d never be able to do that!”

Some people don’t get it at all:

“Wait, so how do you keep in touch with friends?”

“Why are you so antisocial?”

“Are you against having fun, or something?”

But, the most frequent question I get asked is why. Why did I do it? Why did I throw it all away after becoming so invested? Why did I instantly burn bridges with hundreds of people? Why did I consciously choose to cut myself off?

Of course, I’ve already explained the answer.

For me, deleting Facebook took no willpower and was not a feat akin to overcoming an addiction. Not having a Facebook account is certainly a choice, but I hardly find it admirable or otherwise worthy of praise. I also don’t care that other people continue to use Facebook, for whatever necessary purpose they claim. I chose to leave MySpace and Facebook because I finally realized that, when it came to the concept of online social networks, I had the wrong idea about all of it. For some reason, it made sense to me (and probably only me) that social networks would serve as a boost for those like me who have challenges with making friends in real life. As it turned out, MySpace and Facebook were not the great equalizers that I hoped them to be. Because I knew I was in the wrong, it was unfair for me to act offended that no one else was playing by my pretend rules. By 2011, Facebook no longer provided me with the sense of connectedness that it promises to its users, so I did the only thing that seemed logical to do: I disconnected. I am now well aware that there is no shortcut to making and keeping friends, and I’ll be damned if I let another red ball or online profile let me make the same mistake again.