Spring Cleaning
a catalogue of letting go (or possibly running away)
A year ago this month, I deleted my Facebook (again). I first did this with my original account in early 2015. If you had asked me then what my motive was, I would have given you a very twenty-something answer about how I had “grown up” and wanted to focus on things “in real life” now that I had graduated college. The truth? I wanted to feel free.
The who: Old friends it still hurt to see living their lives without me, an ex I didn’t know how to be friends with yet, a co-worker I couldn’t seem to leave at work. The what: Other people’s eyes on me and my life, as if I didn’t already have power over that simply by choosing what to post or share. The how: In lieu of deleting people from my followers list (my life?), I instead chose to delete the context in which we still crossed paths.
The thing about deleting a profile of any kind is that you’re kind of deleting yourself. A long time lover of the word and idea of transcendence, I favor the belief that of course we are more than our profiles and online presences. And yet, there is something we have curated, captured, toiled over, poured into that is undeniably us — or at least parts of us, versions of us. What happens when we erase them? I’m sure a tech bro out there has an answer about whether a digital footprint is ever truly gone, but I’m less interested1 in that and more interested in what gets us itching for the “delete my account” button in the first place.
Other accounts I’ve deleted in the history of my online presence:
I’m absolutely sure there’s more, but these are the standouts, the heavy hitters, the times where I felt like I was reclaiming something about my life after scrubbing these spaces clean of my face and my words. When I place these moments in time, they always coincided with a major life change: graduating high school, graduating college, buying a home while closing a business. Something about flying the metaphorical coop of each of these contexts apparently wasn’t enough for me: I thirsted for more freedom, more change, more...what?
There is probably a sister question here: what did I want less of? Less noise, less interaction, less obligation, less fixation, less distraction, less performance? In 2025 (yes, exactly a decade later, I see it…), I wanted more time and less distraction, but I think, like many of us, I wanted more peace and less enraging content. I still keep up with what’s going on, but my hope was to be more boundaried around how and when I engaged with it so that I could conserve energy for my emotionally intensive job and spare what energy I might on contributing to addressing the global issues at hand instead of doomscrolling. I won’t pretend I’m as active outside my job as I’d like to be, or that I’ve landed on a magic news consumption strategy that works well for me just yet, but I at least feel like I have the chance and space to keep trying.
At this point, I feel the risk creeping in of crafting a How-To Essay or a Here’s What I Learned, and You Can Too! motivational speech. Lately, when I write, I feel more aware of what I don’t want a piece to be than what I actually do want it to be. I wonder if I was in a similar space when I decided to hit delete on Meta: unsure of what I actually wanted but clear on what I no longer wanted. At that time, I thought I would take detailed notes as I went so I could write this piece a year later. My draft had headings (and nothing more):
Stages of Leaving Meta
Feelings of Withdrawal
The Last 13 I’m Still Following (and struggling to actually let go)
Taylor Swift being the Last One Standing
I found I did not take any notes at all after drafting these headings. Turns out, I wasn’t very interested in thinking about Meta once I’d logged off. Sometimes I missed seeing my friends’ photos via Instagram stories, but I found that there were other people in my life who sent me memes directly so I could still laugh, other ways to keep in touch with friends beyond viewing their lives in 30-second flashes. I’m certain I hear their voices more now: I send more voice messages, gravitating towards friends who send them back. I love the choices we have to make to share photos and details of our lives with each other now, rather than making blanket announcements for anyone to see. It feels more affirming: you matter to me; I matter to you. Is that what I wanted more of this time around?
Being a homeowner has ironically resulted in spending more time alone than I ever have before. I live further from my parents, my best friends, and my favorite spots to eat, socialize, shop, and be entertained. My distance from most of these things has been increased merely from twenty minutes to forty or an hour, but it has somehow still made a larger impact than I expected in regards to how connected (or not) I feel. Amidst all of this change in local connection, The Internet has still been there for me. Despite signing out of the Metaverse, I did not sign offline.
Discord, a platform that I only began using to participate in a workshop and then a podcast community, a professional network and then a community organization, was a minimally utilized account of mine until after we moved into this house. As these four different temporary uses fizzled out, my committed use of it has settled into what is essentially the best group chat I have ever been in. Imagine about a classroom’s worth of your favorite schoolmates hanging together and getting to ditch the unsavory parts of the high school experience. People across the world who were strangers to me a year ago are now people I can't wait to tell parts of my day to; they are people I will drive four hours to meet in person, people who know more about the ins and outs of my day than people I actually befriended in high school. This affinity for a new-to-me corner of the internet and the friends I've made there is an experience I’m still living out and trying to understand as it continues to take shape in my life. For now it is cozy and remains stimulating; it has given me something that feels generative and mutually nourishing rather than depleting and miserable.
And yet. This new place means that leaving Meta has not reduced my screen time. It has not resulted in more hours of walking or being in sunshine. It has not resulted in a more consistent writing schedule. While I have started traveling a bit more and certainly see some of my non-Discord friends regularly in person, there are many it remains just as hard as ever to connect with face to face. A year into this replicated experiment, and I am reminded that what we are left with in the aftermath of “freeing” ourselves from anything is the one person we are never, ever free from: ourselves.
The me that I face in the mirror each morning is also the me that “gave up” the following at other points in life for different amounts of time:
red meat, poultry, and dairy products (formerly all animal products)
diet culture
clutter (hello, KonMari method)
Amazon
Target
Walmart
Starbucks
various presidencies of various non-profit organizations
None of these things made it easier to move my body, to put pen to page, to feel totally safe or at ease in this world, to stop questioning my relationships or my professional choices. Clearing out a path to a “better” version of me remains a siren song for me in each New Year, birthday, spring, school year that passes, but I wonder if perhaps the finding in this current study is one that has no end: the cyclical attempt to see the self more clearly.
If you too find yourself attempting to wiggle free of whatever is blocking that line of sight in the mirror, I'm sending you love from the water’s edge, hoping you get even just a glimpse of the person you're trying to be.
XOXOXO,
Ash 💚
Just ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED…
This was merely an empty shell created purely to win concert tickets and bolt.(Remember when you could win concert tickets on Twitter?!)
A brief fever dream that only existed in the two months I spent as a single 22 year-old.
Once we’d moved out, how could I use it after midnight to send silly faces to my college roommate right across the hall when we had expressly committed to each other that we were going to Focus and Get Our Portfolios Finished, NO EXCUSES!
RIP to the half decade I spent as a small business owner.