Facebook has taken my page, my photographs, my game accomplishments, and all my virtual friends hostage.  How did they do this?  They decided they didn’t like my name.  They decided that I needed to prove my identity, and have required me to send documents proving who I am—so that my friends can find me—they don’t want anyone to be “confused” about who I am.  Because everyone knows, my Facebook identity is what matters.  Everyone knows that to the outside world, my Facebook identity proves my existence.  As if.

I posted a few hot tweets earlier today, complaining about how I’ve been hijacked by Facebook.  We’ve looked it up—if they choose to reinstate me (after vetting my documents proving who I am)—it can take up to 12 days.  They think, I’m sure, that I will be so distraught without access to my account that I will do anything they say to get back to it.

True, I’m annoyed about my pictures.  Like really annoyed.  Because I have wedding pictures, and pictures of family, and cats and other things I like stored on their servers.  Like everyone else does—Facebook is, after all, a storage facility for such things.  And they know it.  They tell you, of course, that as soon as you upload anything onto their site, it becomes theirs.  Well, that is a risk we take when we decide to participate in the stupidity that is Facebook.  So I’m annoyed because they have all my pictures and I can’t get access to them.

And I’m annoyed because I will lose some progress in some of my games.  Every day I don’t log in, I lose a week of progress in some games.  Which sucks.

But truthfully, after 12 days of not logging into Facebook, will I even care?  Probably not.  Once I took a 6 week break from Facebook, and somehow my world didn’t collapse.  I think that will be the case this time too.  The longer I can’t log into Facebook, the easier it will become.  I won’t even think about it.

I hate, of course, that I won’t be able to keep up with all the things that my friends post—details about their lives, pictures of their pets, interesting things they’ve read that they want to share.

But… there is a plus side—all that time I spend on Facebook can be better spent writing poetry, revising my work, contributing to this blog.  Facebook is a stupid time suck, let’s be honest.  I said I needed to disconnect from the world—what could be better than being forced to by the cosmos in this way?

It won’t be easy to live without Facebook—after eight years, it has become a daily part of my life—but is it worthwhile?  If they don’t accept my documents, they will suspend my account indefinitely, and there won’t be anything I can do about it.  So I will have to train myself to use my time in more useful ways.

For a writer, that means writing.