Well it’s started.

About 18 months ago, I quit Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. When I say quit, I meant that I simply just left it. Deleted the apps in my phone and didn’t revisit them. In the last few months, through duress, I was part of a French speaking group on Facebook so went back into it for this group (but I now stopped the French group because I didn’t want to be part of the Facebook group). Also as I had to sell something on FB Marketplace (which I did, $500 in pocket thank you very much), I now am ready to get rid of it once and for all. Never again. I will not join any Facebook Group ever.

That means deleting the account like it never existed.

Tonight, I requested to get the archive from LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter too. These will take over 24-48 hours to come into my inbox which will have the record of all my posts, videos, photos and data. Once I have these files, in effect, it’s like these platforms are handing back to me, boxes filled with my data, information, photos, videos, my life that i shared with them over the years.

With LinkedIn, I won’t get rid of it just yet but as I don’t follow anyone on it, and as I’ve locked the settings so no application links to it, in effect it’s like a “static CV”. I will not be posting or sharing anything anymore. Really, I don’t want to be bothered with LinkedIn.

(All these screen shots of tweets in my blog will also disappear because I’ll be deleting Twitter too).

With Facebook, I’ll wait until I receive the archive before finally deleting the entire account. I did the same with Instagram which has some great photos over the years that I didn’t keep on my phone or computer. (I’m hindsight I should have done this but it’s a lesson learned too late.)

With Twitter, again I have requested the archive and given it has to go through at least a decade of tweets, it’s taking a long time. Once I have my archive saved, I can deactivate the entire account. Goodbye Twitter.

It’ll be sad to be off social media completely but part of me thinks that I’ll be better for it mentally. This has been brewing up over these last few years but I just haven’t ripped that Band-Aid. I keep thinking that I will miss the friends I made and the conversations but in all honesty, I can have these without the whole world listening into my conversations with a few people.

So the time to get rid of it all is now.

I put off doing this last step in getting the archive because I’ve spent the last decade or so using social media nearly every day so it would have taken a while.

Recording books I’ve read, projects I’ve made, places I’ve travelled to. It’s a lot! My entire life of learning and creating online. My last 10-12 years documented and sitting across multiple social media platforms.

I’ve met so many people around the world and it’s been great but the time has come to claim back my time and my head space.

Every time I get on social media, I don’t feel inspired. It makes me angry, sad, jealous, empty – and most of all I feel like it’s zapping my empathy.

Nothing surprises me anymore and I really need to create some space between me and “the world”. It’s just getting too much at times. Stories of people, some incredibly sad, their grief, their happiness, their adventures, some fun and some real sickos out there – it gets too much to take it in. Most of all, many times I don’t want to know it all. It’s nice to be naive at times because everything you see is then wondrous and full of possibility. If you keep reading negativity, you start to think what’s the point of it all – and this is exactly the feeling that I don’t want to have.

Despite curating my Twitter feed constantly through lists, people now share all sorts of emotion (me included) and I can’t handle it anymore because it impacts me. I get riled up.

So over the next couple of days, as I receive the archives of my entire social media life, I will finally deactivate them all once and for all and hopefully get rid of the feelings such as self righteousness, ego and anger and replace them once again with focus and attention to my loved ones, getting more time back, return of empathy and living in the moment.