During my senior year of college, I had a phase where I started de-friending people on my Facebook.
I didn't go through the complete friend list, but I did end up deleting quite a bit of people-- only the ones I figured I'd never see again. If I thought they had some sort of stake in my life, I didn't delete them.
I did the de-friending because I was 1) an angry girl in general and 2) tired of seeing posts that I didn't care about. While I didn't think anyone would take it personally (even though it's quite a personal gesture) and no one confronted me about it (perhaps we were so insignificant in each others' lives that they didn't even notice?), when I found out it happened to me by someone I don't care about a couple years ago, I was offended.
Partly, I wished that I had de-friended them first (but I didn't because I thought this person had some stake in my life-- I guess not), and partly because I thought it was pretty uncharacteristic of the person to do so. At least for me, I'm kind of socially isolated and bitchy, so it makes some sense why I would do that. But when a nice person de-friends you, you're kind of like, What did I do to deserve this?
I don't take offense to it anymore (as I found that time heals all). But it did make me realize a few things:
-it sucks to be de-friended, regardless of relationship
-it's also quite amazing. Why? Because-- as I've noticed in my decision to take the Instagram app off of my phone since I wasn't an active poster yet actively went through ceaseless posts-- it's liberating. I mean, this depends on the relationship to the culprit, but if you stop following and being exposed to the person that makes you feel inadequate/jealous/worthless, it's like... wow, you didn't even know you had this kind of confidence in yourself. And you start doing things simply for yourself and not for all these people you actually realized you don't care to have their respect.
