"Mom on the Rise"
the Traveling Homeschooler
by Kristina Brooke
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February 14th, 2010

Valentine’s Day Purge

Andrew and I don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day. Much like her, we choose to only indulge in discounted chocolates the day after. For us love is about the every day not about the forced emotional displays of affection. Social Media, as much as I love it, is much like Valentine’s Day- forced relationship fluff. Lately, I have been feeling suffocated by my online life. So, in keeping with my desire to be fluff-free I have been doing a little purging.

Twitter Purge

I have multiple Twitter accounts but @momontherise is my main account for this blogging. Unfortunately, it is also one of the reasons that I haven’t really been into Twitter lately. I was following so may people that I really felt there was not personal involvement. When Google introduced Buzz I was immediately drawn to it because of the personal nature of the network. You connect to people right away in part because you can follow conversations and such. As I talked about this with a few online friends, one mentioned how she had unfollowed every one in her Twitter stream and started adding only those who she wanted to connect with. She pointed me to http://www.unfolloweveryone.com and I immediately decided that this was the greatest thing since WiFi. I followed suit and went from follow over 5,0o0 people to none to 150. I am only adding those who I actually talk to- those who are more interested in selling me their business or services without connecting on a personal level will have to go. I find it very difficult to function in the noise.

Facebook Purge

Since refocusing on building my businesses (kristinabrooke.org and Moms/We of Hue), I decided to extend my purging to facebook too. I started by removing myself from all the games that I played on the site (Cafe World and Mafia Wars are addicting), blocking the applications that were too distracting, and then I removed over 100 “friends’ from high school, college, and previous jobs. The fact of the matter is there is no point being connected to people who you never really liked or connected with in real life anyway. I hated HS and really have bad memories of a lot of my so called friends from those years. Having them on my FB page made me second guess what I was posting and it was just too stifling. So, I broke up with them. The games were eating away at my productivity and I had to remove them too.

Next Steps

Prior to writing this post I opened up my Gmail account and decided to unsubscribe from all the mailing lists, newsletters, and other groups that I get email from but never read. I am tired of opening my Inbox and finding over 1000 messages most of which I delete without reading anyway. If I don’t care, I am not going to subscribe.

I am also going to clean out my Bloglines account and remove the blogs that don’t update or the ones that I really don’t read. I just don’t have the energy to deal with the overcrowding.

I’ll be writing about my In-Real-Life friends Purge soon too.

Are you purging? How?

Wow you must be walking around in my head or something, girlfriend. I’ve been slowly doing this same thing and it’s quite liberating. I don’t have the time or energy anymore for “fluffy” relationships. I downsized my twitter last month (it still needs more downsizing). This month I downsized my facebook (still needs more downsizing too) and it terrified me b/c I was afraid “some” people would be offended. But honestly, I’m about the positive and moving in a forward direction. Of course, everyone has had a bad day, bad hair day, funky mood day etc. etc. But, if all a person can talk about is the negative in their lives and someone else’s life, then you and I have hit a big impasse in our depth of conversation. And beyond that, like you said, some people I really didn’t consider a friend – I just friended/followed/ out of this sense of obligation. I realized I don’t owe anyone a friendship or twitter add for any reason…so they HAD TO GO! LOL
Quiskaeya´s last blog ..The Case for Adoptive Breastfeeding

adiaha

I like to hold on to folks. But that never really happens. I have been going through a forced purge of things of late. Astrologically it is tied to Jupiter, something bigger is waiting for me, so all of my weird and just hard to maintain relationships have been dying on the road side. One of them quite dramatically but well what can a sista’ do? I am going to b moving of the “Conscious” folks on my Facebook who use the word “Cracker” off! I answered a few friend requests and now I am flooded. For everyone I accept, I turn 5 down! Intolerance of any kind is not acceptable and I won’t accept it even from my own (especially in public!). I am so glad that I am not on my own here….

Peace.
adiaha´s last blog ..Finding Joy

{reflect.rethink.redo.}