How I Survived a Year and a Half Without Facebook, Part 3: The Momentary Lapse

Unfortunately, a “clean break” isn’t always as clean as you’d like it to be. Habits, even dangerous ones, can be very hard to overcome. Your mind lets its guard down just for a moment, and your body goes on autopilot, as when you’re on your way down a familiar stretch of road, you zone out on the highway screaming along to your favorite song, end up taking the wrong exit, and are now on your way to your old job - or your ex’s house.

So it was with me, mere hours after quitting Facebook. Later that same day, after checking my email and scrolling through several pages of lolcats, I became hypnotized, just as if I were on a familiar highway. I went on autopilot; I began tapping the keys absent-mindedly. When one, by chance, turned out to be the F key, in a flash my other hand shot over to the mouse and selected the autofilled URL of Facebook. It loaded immediately, and with a swiftness born of years of practice, my fingers hammered out the six-to-twelve characters of my password, reactivating my account. I had already scrolled through several posts before I realized, with horror, what I’d done. I threw aside the mouse as if it were something the cat had left me, and I shrank away from the desk, hissing faintly and guarding my vital organs.

I would guess that this is the social-networking equivolent of waking up next to your recently-dumped ex. In addition to the shame of realizing just how weak your self-control is, there’s the matter of dealing with the aftermath. You must reiterate once again the entire breaking-up process, except this time, your words lack the strength of finality due to your having demonstrated, in painfully explicit detail, just how precisely “no” means “no.”

And so, once again, I had to de-reactivate my account, with all the same whys and are-you-sures and confirmations and verifications. I may have imagined it, but this time, Facebook seemed less in shock and more gleeful, now that it knew that my every “yes I’m sure” could still mean “we’ll see.” I closed the tab with a grimace of shame, vowing never again.

If only it were that simple. Over the course of the following week, it happened more times than I’d ever like to recall. It got so that the process of de-re-de-re-deactivating my account became almost as automatic as that first inadvertent sign-in. After several days, tired of playing out the same tragic dance again and again, I tried to think of a way to force myself to stop. I needed help.

It occurred to me that, even with my account deactivated, Chrome remembered to fill in my username on the sign-in page, even if I’d managed to keep it from remembering my password. If I could get it to forget my username as well, would the extra step involved in signing in help break the cycle? It was worth a try. I cleared my browser history, something we all need to start doing more regularly, and checked back; the username field was now blank.

That did it. That one tiny change was enough. The next time I went on autopilot and typed in the Facebook URL, the blank username field gave me just enough of a pause to break the spell, shake me out of my trance, and bring me back into my senses. Then I could close the tab and make my escape. Finally, I was free. For real this time.

Promise.

To find out what happened next, go on to Part 4.