The Life Changing Act of Deleting People on Facebook

It's September 2005. You've started at your new High School and oh my god you don't know anyone and why do the year 11's look so ginormous??? Surely you can never grow to that height??? You cling to the first person who catches your eye and awkwardly compliments your scoobie string keyring hanging from your Jane Norman shopping tote bag. So commences a few years of happy friendship, until eventually you grow apart and now, you're 23 and haven't spoken in, surely not, SEVEN years? But you were best pals once, right? So you can't actually delete each other on Facebook?

Social media, is a blessing and a curse. In fact, the whole topic of this blog post has been discussed tenfold on my group chat, because recently most of us have been feeling the impact of social media containing a lot of baggage. Meet someone on a night out in the girls toilet and drunkenly give her your Facebook? And then three months later you come across a tragic post on the loss of her pet gerbil, you think 'who is that' and yet completely forget to delete her. Or you join a new job and everyone jumps onto adding you in the first week, and low and behold a couple of months later you move on? We've all been there. 'What if I bump into them on the street', 'what if they notice'? Honestly, and I can't say really say this nicely enough, but who cares?

Facebook has been built to become a lot bigger than we are ourselves. Deleting someone on Facebook somehow means more to people than actually being cut out of eachothers lives. And it's this attitude which should almost force us to jump start, and question why. Why does it matter so much? Why is it a form of validation?

Facebook brings baggage and guilt which has never been accessible in this way before. Suddenly we know people's business when we don't even know their phone numbers. Loved ones deaths, new jobs, where they've gone on holiday. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has spent time browsing someone's facebook profile, clicking on their best friend, clicking on his girlfriend, and suddenly you're looking at her cousins girlfriends 2k11 holiday snaps. And that person you originally clicked on? You never even spoke to them at school anyway.

Deleting people on Facebook is not only necessary, but it's healthy. Go by the rule, if you wouldn't stop and talk to them on the street, you don't need to know their online business. Assess the relationship you have, however much you want to know what your ex-boyfriend/girlfriend is doing right now, is it really healthy to have them online?

You'll never really be able to cut people out of your life and move on whilst they're lingering in the back of your social media presence, and that is the new dimension to life we haven't quite grasped yet. Social media is a wonderful thing, but maintaining a healthy relationship with it is so important. It's way past the time to get rid of the social media baggage, it just took me this long to come to terms with how important it really is.

Love, Alice x