Archive for February, 2012

Bye-bye, Facebook!

Saturday, February 4th, 2012

Just letting everyone know that I have disabled my Remicade Dream Facebook account and page, and I will probably be deleting them after awhile – I’m giving myself a grace period to see if I change my mind. There are a few reasons I’ve done this:

1. I’m spending too much time on Facebook as it is, and am trying to cut back. I already have a personal account that I check constantly. Having a second one just ended up feeling like pressure.

2. I’m really unhappy with some changes to Facebook’s privacy policies and bugs in the new Timeline. On my personal account, I’ve seen things slip through my very tight privacy settings because of bugs in the program. So I’m minimizing my Facebook presence in general. I still have a personal account because, unfortunately, it seems to be how all of my friends communicate these days and I would miss out on too many things if I stopped using it altogether. But I plan to post very little, and definitely nothing I don’t want everyone in the world to be able to see.

3. I’ve friended several different chronic illness-related groups and people on my Remicade Dream account, and I’m finding that every time I do go on there and start reading, I get stressed. There seems to be a lot of infighting, rivalries between groups, and general unhappiness. I don’t want to get involved.

4. I’m trying to take a step back from too much online RA information.

This last one is a tricky one. I’m in (knock wood) a really good place with my RA right now – this is the best I’ve felt in years. I have a strong desire not to disappear entirely from the RA community; I think that seeing people doing well gives us hope. (I know it always gave me hope in the past when I wasn’t doing well.) But I also feel the need these days to reclaim more of my life outside RA, and I want to put more time and mental energy into other things. So I plan to maintain the blog, keep checking in on an online group that has become very important to me, and keep reading the RA blogs I already read – but I don’t plan to seek out any new ones for awhile.

Anyway, I don’t think anyone will really miss the Facebook page. It didn’t get a lot of action anyway.