whygodwhy #17: vaguely self-cancelled on every platform

OK so I'm trying to like, figure out my life online. It's going not amazing. I deactivated my Facebook years ago and then finally a few months ago? for some reason? was finally like….wyd, and deleted it entirely. Or at least I went through the steps listed to deactivate it entirely. I immediately got an email alert that someone was trying to change my password. So is it actually deactivated? I have this nightmare sense that if I try to log back in in an attempt to validate the deactivation, FB will interpret that as a change of heart, and all the data they collected about me over the years will jump out and yell 🎉YOU THOUGHT🎉. idk. Real Schrödinger's Cat hours.

So then Instagram, which is a whole thing. I like it! But the world we live in is the world we live in so I logged out and deleted it from my phone over the summer just to try to live without it. Like everything you learn to live without, it got easier over time. Definitely do not have the heart to deactivate it entirely yet. People still message me there! There's no easy way to say "Hey I'm not really here anymore/right now." IG provided a lot of inspiration for my writing, and I haven't been doing that much writing since I deleted it, but whether or not these things are related is a completely separate post.

Twitter, no hand-wringing there really, I deleted all my tweets and logged out way over a year ago. Again haven't deleted my account yet but doesn't feel like it's long for this world. Although what if something changes, what if I DO need it at some point, what if what if.

There's other sites as well, smaller social media spots that are historically great b/c a lot of people don't know about them, so I won't list them here, but I've also deleted those from my phone, at least temporarily. Just to sit with it and see how it feels. Mostly I feel: it sucks, b/c those are my friends, and there's a level on which me being off social media = me saying I don't want to be friends with you, or I'm not interested in the details of your life, or something like that. Which isn't true, and so I can make a concerted effort to not let it be true, by texting, checking in with people. Which I'm admittedly not GREAT at. And but by not being on social am I just making more work for my friends? If I ask what they're up to this weekend or what's going on in their lives this week will their first inclination be: How about read the thing I just posted instead of making me retype it.

OK and then: Google. No major delusions about cutting them out of my life entirely, but I learned the phrase "large attack surface" recently and it hit me different. So I'm slowly switching over to a new email address, away from Google (HI!). As anyone who clicked that link can tell I switched to DuckDuckGo years ago.

Over the summer I took all my fiction collections off the Amazon Kindle store and put them on Gumroad. Sales are down, self-satisfaction way up.

So delete all my social media and that would just leave my website, this thing here, except I'm not really good at updating, and am year over year increasingly the type of person who is not posting anything personal online. So good, welcome to a website where you can follow along for personal updates that may never arrive. 

Anyways how are you??? Should I post a screenshot of this to IG so that people know I'm alive.

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xokfan / whygodwhy.com