I wrote a farewell status to everyone on Facebook today and later overheard Graeme on the phone to a friend - this is kind of how it went:
Yeah she’s deleting Facebook but she’ll still have her blog page…
Yeah she’s still using clay to wash her hair, the organic stuff made her hair greasy…
Yeah she’s still not eating meat so if you let us know what you’re planning on cooking we’ll make a plan…Yeah that one went out the window. If you’re a qualified nutritionist and know how people with severely compromised guts can eat vegetarian without any processed foods, beans, pulses, grains, without a copious amount of nuts and seeds, and without supplementing with synthetic vitamins and minerals with low bioavailability, then by all means let me know. Otherwise, piss off.
I’m sorry I’m becoming that crazy person you all know.
What can I say, I like to shake my life up now and then. It’s my nature.
I don’t even know why I decided to stop using shampoo in the first place, mostly just to see if I could do it.
But doing it has taken us both on this unexpectedly lovely journey - we have eliminated the vast majority of chemicals throughout our home and replaced them with gentler but equally as effective natural products.
And that has led us to start buying products that have travelled less to get to us or from sustainable sources, made by people trying to make a difference in the world - not by slaves in sweat shops for faceless corporations.
We buy the majority of our fruit and veg from our local farm shop and we get our meat from a local butcher, which are both actually cheaper per kg and better quality than the supermarkets, whose farming practices we really don’t agree with.
We still have a long way to go and it’s pretty much impossible to find options that are good for your health and are sustainable and are effective and are animal cruelty-free (or are at least higher welfare), but months of research has gradually led us to find some great starting points.
Our energy supplier and banks are also more ethical now, because contrary to popular belief green energy is cheaper and it is so important to know where you’re putting your money. And that’s all we can do, our little bit to help one purchase or petition at a time.
But Facebook?
I’m eschewing Facebook for completely different reasons to any of this hippie dippy stuff.
Firstly I’m fed up that a number of men - exes or otherwise - contact me privately on Facebook from time to time. This week was just a bit horrible when someone I broke up with over 6 years ago sent me a random message in the middle of the night.
It’s incredibly upsetting for Graeme and myself when people don’t respect the fact that we’re engaged, and blocking people has also proved ineffective - just recently an abusive ex-boyfriend messaged me from a new profile 8 years on.
I simply will not put up with enjoying my life for months at a time only for some perv to worm out of the woodwork to say “hello” at a moment of his choosing. I value my personal space and I just don’t want to keep using a platform that people who refuse to respect boundaries choose to use to harass others.
Now I know that I could tighten up my security settings and stop any outsider from contacting me (I shouldn’t have to - plus it doesn’t stop messages getting to your filtered inbox) - but it’s also Facebook’s horrendous algorithms that have been really getting to me the last few months.
I’ve already deleted the racists and the morons so I don’t have to look at any Britain First posts anymore, but every now and then I’ll notice that a friend has a new profile picture that I completely missed, yet my timeline is packed full of posts they liked on random pages or posts on their timeline from people I don’t even know.
I don’t want to see that, do you?!
I spend more time hiding irrelevant posts than anything else when I’m on Facebook - it’s been a horrendous user experience that I just don’t get any fulfilment from anymore.
Graeme also deleted his account at the time because once I started ranting about how much I hate Facebook, he admitted how addicted he is to checking it for no reason when he could be reading or researching or doing something useful with his time.
And that was another good point - I spend very little time on it anymore because I devote so much of my “online time” to trying to become a more informed consumer, and I really only check Facebook to try and make sure I haven’t missed any engagement or wedding or baby updates so that friends won’t think I’m snubbing them.
I’ll miss keeping up with people who I wouldn’t necessarily swap numbers with and I’m sure I’ll check in after a while to see if the algorithms have changed, but for now I won’t miss wasting my time wading through page likes, cat videos and politically-charged rants.
I’m all about detoxing - so much so that I started up a half-arsed series about it. This is just my Facebook detox phase - something that needing in itself is pretty worrying - and I’m looking forward to seeing how it makes me feel over time.
