How many of you have been spending an inordinate amount of time these past few days “unfriending” people on Facebook?  I have noticed, since the election results, this has become the new normal.  I myself have been trying to whittle down my almost 1,000 friends to under 100.  May I tell you it’s impossible to do without hurting people’s feelings?  The firestorm I created “unfriending” people on my private page has given me pause, and has forced me to rethink my views about social media.

I am one of those people who is scared to death of hurting other people’s feelings.  I have had a Facebook account since 2008.  It has always been private.  I also have business pages on Facebook.  They are public.  My settings allow for “friends of friends” to “friend” me.  Over the years, as I’ve received “friend requests”, I have always looked first as to who our mutual friend was, and then I’ve always accepted.  My fear of hurting anyone’s feelings is why I have accepted every friend request that popped up in my messages.

A few days ago, post election morning, at around 5:30am (I couldn’t sleep), I responded to a friends post and in return, received a vitriolic, nasty reply by someone I didn’t know.  That was it.  That was the breaking point for me.  I wanted Facebook out of my life.  I had always seen the “deactivate” link, but had never explored it before, so went searching for it to finally deactivate my page and be done with Facebook forever.  Unfortunately, since I’ve had my account for so long, I could not remember my password.  I didn’t have the time, nor the patience, to go through the hullabaloo of changing my password, so went straight to my friends list and just began deleting … oops, sorry, “unfriending”, starting with the first person on my friend list.  My goal was to retain only my immediate family.  I tore through the first 200 names looking only for the name “Childers”.  Everyone else I “unfriended”.

What a task THAT turned out to be!!  I stopped at around 200, then walked away, as I had a deadline for a costume design job I was on, and needed to get to work.  As I designed, I started getting “unfriend remorse” (maybe Big Pharma will develop a pill for this), so I went BACK to my computer and wrote a thoughtful, sweet note to a few people I love to explain my intentions.  I even included some neighbors I wasn’t quite sure I had “unfriended”, but knowing I was going to be at my design table all day, I didn’t want them to discover I had “unfriended” them before I could tell them why I did so.  I sent my note and went back to my design table.

A few hours later, I came back into my office and saw I had quite a few private messages.  Well, my note did not go over well.  I was miffed.  Actually, I was angry, so once again, I opened my “friends” list and re-started “unfriending”.  I got through almost another 200 people again before I went back to my design table.

It is now 3 days later and I am STILL dealing with hurt feelings.  It has eviscerated me, as the last thing I wanted to do was hurt people’s feelings.  So…

I have spent WAY too much time thinking about this, but here’s the deal.  I keep going back to the way I was raised, and hearing my Mom’s voice in my head telling me most of the people I called friends were actually just acquaintances, that my true friends will be few and they will stick with me for life.  I can’t tell you how many times my mother told me this when I was young.  So here I found myself, at 63, with over 900 “friends”.  I can’t stop laughing.  These people are not my friends, they are my “acquaintances”; most of whom I’ve never met in person to begin with.

The moral of this diatribe is, it’s my fault.  My page is private.  It always has been.  I’ve allowed people who think differently than I, inside my head, inside my thoughts, every time I pressed “accept”.  This idea that everyone is “our friend” is erroneous.  I think if anything this election has taught us, or at least I HOPE has taught us, is that, it’s okay to not be social with people who think differently than you.  You are not being judgmental, you are simply remaining “private”.  After all, isn’t that what the “private” setting is for?