Last night, I finally decided to deactivate my Facebook. In the past week, I had four people (customers from my job) who messaged me on there for work-related matters and I realized that just having a Facebook account was causing me unnecessary stress. Years ago, back when I first started my position, I didn’t think there was any harm in adding people. I thought, maybe I could make some friends? Shaking my head.

I can’t count how many times I was disturbed during my naps over the weekend because I had forgotten to activate Do Not Disturb or put my phone or tablet on manner mode. I can’t count how many times I was eating dinner with Miyu or the three of us were out at a restaurant on a weeknight or even a weekend and to hear that telltale ping, dreading who messaged me this time. Or we would be out shopping, enjoying time off work when all of the sudden I would hear the dreaded ping, mouth off a few choice curses, only to realize it was just my mom. Or I would be on my couch or relaxing in bed and reading on my Kindle when all of the sudden I hear the ping and whaddya know, someone needed help logging into their account. It was always about work with these people. It was never about anything non-work related. It was never like “Hey Renee, how are you? Did you watch the latest episode of The Mandalorian?!” Even the “friends” I thought I made would only message me whenever they needed something. It had become a habit for people to use my personal Facebook as a means to get “personalized” customer service from me.

Well, enough is enough. It was foolish of me to think that maybe people might get their acts together and have more respect or at the very least, show some decency. Reality is, people take advantage of nice people, and they don’t care. This is especially true when nice people, such as myself, enable those behaviors. I have to admit though that there were one or two people who were very polite, at least. They thanked me a lot for helping them and they only messaged me because their issues were serious or complicated.

Thinking that I could make friends this way was an honest mistake. But I’m glad things turned out like this because I was never really happy on Facebook anyway. It taught me a great deal about setting boundaries, and valuing and respecting my time. It showed me who my real friends are, and I can honestly say that I don’t have many of those, but I’m still grateful for the few I actually have. It was nice to see some random updates from people I care about, most notably my mom and some other family members, but unfortunately, having a Facebook finally became more of a burden and a constant source of dread. It was no longer an enjoyable experience for me.

So…Goodbye, Facebook. I have no plans to reactivate you anytime soon.

I tried deactivating my Messenger but for some reason could not, for the life of me, find the deactivation feature. It was either delete my Facebook account permanently or keep it. I ended up deleting both apps from my phone and from my tablet. I’m now only using Line to talk to family and close friends only. C’est la vie! That’s one New Year’s Resolution completed.

Update: I was able to find the deactivation feature after I deleted the Messenger app, and redownloaded it from the App Store.