Oh, Facebook . . .

I was a very reluctant convert to FB and ended up deactivating my account about 6 months ago. Facebook was just too depressing and I can honestly say the quality of my life before joining FB was much better than the quality of my life after joining FB. Prior to joining FB I was just me, a reasonably happy person with a few good friends, not a lot of ambition, but happy where I was and no longer thinking of all the people from the past that used to bug me. I was way past trying to impress anyone or caring much what anyone thought. All FB did was make me aware of how deficient I was because everyone else seemed so happy and successful and attractive. I only had about 100 friends and it was really stretching to call some of those people friends, so of course that made me feel like a total unlikable loner. As an added aggravation, all these people from high school that I'd happily forgotten existed crawled back out from under their rocks and made me aware of the fact that they still continued to exist. It was like I was plunged into a high school popularity contest and I started to be plagued with the same stupid anxieties and insecurities I had back then. I finally caught on that the whole thing was a con. No one's life is perfect. Some people are just really, really good at self-marketing and are also really huge narcissists. The pictures people want to present of themselves in their profiles are so edited and scrubbed and polished that they no longer resemble real people. And that's the problem. I started comparing my real self with people who weren't real at all. Once I figured that out, I felt a lot better. I'm so glad I'm no longer a part of FB.