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Why My Cultish Final Exit From Facebook Should Freak You Out
Almost three years, I decided to deactivate my Facebook account. It wasn’t a rushed decision, but rather a gradual process that was inspired by my need to regain control of my affairs.
When I signed up for the experiment that went wrong, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect aside from the immediate euphoria of being able to reach out and touch familiar names and faces that situated in vastly different time zones.
I’m not going to downplay how good it felt to reconnect with long lost girlfriends from boarding school, who perfectly fit the definition of “friends” by social media standards. I was basically a zombie in high school for reasons that weren’t that clear then, but make a lot of sense now.
Being born in the States and then moving back to Nigeria at the age of eight, was a lot more complicated than it sounds. I never meshed well with my homeland, and the misery began in primary school, when I was relentlessly teased about my American accent. And my boarding school years weren’t all that better either — as I struggled to seamlessly fit in and foster the friendships that were meant too extend past graduation.
My weird accent eventually evolved into something less problematic, but my mannerisms that bordered on “too lady-like” or whatever it was that left a bullseye on my back, seemed to interfere with my ability to blend in without suspicion. It wasn’t that the girls disliked me, it was just an overall acknowledgment of how I was just too different to ever be popular or safely immune from the pile of semi-rejects.
I returned to America after boarding school, to pursue college, and it wasn’t until my late twenties, that I began to revisit my boarding school days through some re-activated connections. This was a decade away from Facebook or any of the other purposed connectors, and so that meant face-to-face meetings or phone calls.
The initial excitement always ended up dipping into the old familiarity of feeling slightly out of place — particularly since we were now adults with careers, and from my prospective, I was definitely the least accomplished of the group. My hopes of becoming a writer was still ions away from being furnished, while my old classmates had chosen more lucrative routes…
