unplug

I deleted my Facebook account today.  I'm uncertain what I am trying to achieve with it but wanted to see.

Admittedly I am logged in constantly, but because I did a good job of editing friends, limiting it to a little over 100 people, I feel like the need to constantly be plugged in is unnecessary because sometimes, I don't even see new feeds for hours, though I do constantly check to see if there is any.

I like to think that being plug in help my in-laws stay connected to my daughter, who is 3,000 miles away, but the reality is that they haven't commented on a single one of her picture in the last few months, so the excuse is a poor one.  I am already skeptical of the privacy issue as is and already post very few pictures as is, combine that with the lack of activities I see from the intended audience really solidify that it is a poor excuse.

Facebook makes my inner green monster rear its head on more occasions than I would like.  I see my friends go on trips and I get jealous.  I see them doing fun things as a family on their days off and I get jealous.  In actuality, my life is pretty damn fabulous as well, not by comparison but by its own right, and I want to get back to appreciating it for what it is.  Comparison really is the thief of joy and I want to be more purposeful in finding joy in what I do instead of finding misery in what I don't do.

And though I have done a really good job of preventing drama in the social medium, sometimes, there is drama created in my internal thoughts and I don't like it.  On more than one occasions, I perceive others to be bad friends, when in fact they probably are not, because they don't rave about me in a status update when I had went out of my way for them, but in the next status raved about how great someone is for having done something miniscule by comparison.  It's overly dramatic and completely unnecessary. 

I want to get back to my life - to take a picture of my child to freeze an important moment in time, not to post it as to see how many likes I get.  I don't want to take pictures to show off what a wonderful mother I am, but instead to one day show how much I love them through documented evidence.

Because there are too many moments lately where I am proud to have captured them because they tell a story of how my girl had really blossomed. 

She is happy and often show them in complete surrender of a smile, and how her smile looks just like her father's, but she is still in fact every bit a mama's girl.

I want to capture our experiences, our emotions, our dynamic as a family, for the sake of preserving a memory. I want to be less superficial. I have been told that I have a way of capturing human emotions in my photographs, and that is one of the best compliments I have ever received. I want to be purposeful, I want to document, I want to record this one wild and precious life, even if they are uneventful at times.