I Deleted Them All

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I came home on Saturday night after ComedySportz and decided to check Facebook.

I immediately found myself inundated with updates—many of them from old students who were never actually in my class. In fact, there were so many updates that I had no recent activity listed from family and close friends – these didn’t even make it to my homepage because they’d been pushed down so far in the queue. I had been hit – yet again – with the familiar “So-And-So Answered A Question About you” and “Is Teachinfourth A Good Friend?” amongst half-a-dozen other apps yet again requesting me to ‘be a friend’ and do this or that. It seemed that no matter how many times I’d chosen to block these types of apps, others would spring up to take their place, as well as multiple updates from the same person taking up an entire wall page.

It was getting old.

Really old.

I looked at my friend count and saw it was near the 600 mark.

I had 600 friends? Really?

I didn’t recall that I’d hung out with anywhere near 600 people on a regular basis. I couldn’t recall even if I’d seen some of these people in the past two or three years.

I remembered a blog post I’d done some time back about the notorious ‘Friend Request’ and realized that I had – at one time – accepted all of these requests, but now it had become far too much. Maybe some individuals like to have a million friends, but to me it was becoming more of a chore than anything else.

I thought about simply switching off my Facebook account for a while and giving myself a break, but unfortunately my Classroom of Chaos and Adventures & Misadventures of Daily Living pages kept me from doing that – since I was the administrator of both pages - they’d be deleted.

I groaned inwardly and thought of all the work associated with putting both of those pages back online.

Ugh…it just wasn’t worth it.

As I looked through my friend list, I knew that multiple people would be offended if I deleted them. After all, wouldn’t you be, in knowing you didn’t make the cut?

So I found a way to remedy this.

I deleted everyone.

You heard me.

Right before going to bed I deleted every one of the 600 friends I had on my Facebook profile.

Now, I’m not going to lie at this point. When I woke up this morning I thought, “Holy Hannah…what in the world did I just do? I just deleted every single person that I’d built up as friends over the past four or five years!” I grabbed my laptop and checked my profile.

It wasn’t a dream; I had zero friends.

I felt a delicious thrill of horror; and that’s really the best way I can describe it. It was a type of panic and relief all wrapped up in one.

I did a quick search and found my immediate family members and added them as well as a handful of other people, and that was it.

I’ve decided to make a few changes, too...like perhaps following my own advice from two or so years ago so I don't find myself yet again in this same predicament. At this point, I figure that the people who really want to have me as a friend will realize that I’m gone and will send the request, and for those who didn’t…well, then I guess I wasn’t all that great of a friend to begin with.

As of right now I have 37 friends, and for now that's enough...until a few more discover that I'm gone.