December 5: Let Go

Photo by by ginatrapani.

I'm participating in #reverb10, a month-long challenge to blog every day of December based on prompts provided here.

Prompt: Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?

I let go of about a gazillion virtual friends this year. I don't know how I came to have so many on Facebook, but it had come time to whittle it down. The rules were simple. If I do not even know who you were, I deleted you. If I only met you once or twice and we never spoke again, I deleted you. If you were a giant a-hole to me and I was only Facebook friends for who even knows why, I deleted you. That included people that I used to be friends with or people I used to live with. The a-holiness was automatic delete delete delete.

I got rid of 200-300 in a couple hours of purging.The initial reasoning was to keep my online self a little bit more private. As I kept erasing people from my life, I was kind of freaked out by how many I had let in.

In fact, it wasn't easy to delete everyone. Some, like the a-hole people, were obvious and painless. But to cut off your one and only tie with someone is a scary thing to do. I told myself it was okay if If I hadn't talked to these people in years. Once I deleted them, I felt better. It's like donating clothes to a thrift store. Once you get them out of your house, you completely forgot you ever had them.