The Day I Deleted LinkedIn
I logged out of the performance and back into my actual life.
I discovered how far gone I was the night I caught myself drafting an inspirational post about my father's stroke.
He was asleep in a hospital bed four feet away, monitors ticking their green arithmetic, and I was in the vinyl chair with my phone lighting my face, typing: Life update. This week has been one of the hardest of my life. But sitting in this hospital room, I've been reflecting on resilience, and I wanted to share three lessons. I had gotten as far as lesson two. I had chosen the line breaks for maximum scroll retention. I had considered... and I need you to sit with this... whether a photo of the hospital corridor would perform.
Then my father coughed in his sleep, an old man's cough he had never had before that week, and I saw the screen the way a stranger would see it, and I put the phone face down on my knee like it had bitten me.
Let me back up.
Eight months earlier I had been laid off from a marketing job I was good at, in one of those Tuesday morning video calls where a person you have never met reads to you from a document. Within an hour... and I mean within the hour, I had added the green Open To Work ring to my profile photo and published a post about gratitude. Grateful for the memories. Grateful for the incredible people. Excited for the next chapter.
I was not grateful.
I was terrified and humiliated, standing in my kitchen still wearing the blazer I had put on for the call that ended me. But I understood the liturgy, so I performed it, and forty one people sent me the clapping emoji, and I refreshed that number like a slot machine until midnight.
That was the true beginning of the sickness, although the infection was older. The layoff just removed my immune system.
Without a job title, the feed became my job.
I posted on schedule. I commented strategically, early, on the right people's updates, the way you leave offerings at particular shrines. I had 2,847 connections and could have told you meaningful things about maybe forty of them, but I knew all their milestones, because milestones were the only dialect anyone spoke there. Thrilled to announce. Humbled to share. Honored to join.
And underneath every announcement, in a register only I could hear, ran the real feed, the one written by my own comparison engine: she was your intern. He is four years younger than you. They got funded. You got a rejection template with the wrong first name in it.
The intern one deserves its own paragraph. Nadia had interned for me six years earlier, a lovely and hardworking person who deserved everything good. When she posted that she had made vice president, I typed Congratulations! So deserved! in under thirty seconds, with the exclamation points, with a heart reaction for good measure, while lying in a dark bedroom at 1 am with the phone glow on my face like a bruise, feeling something I am only now able to name honestly.
It was not envy of Nadia.
It was grief for a version of myself I had apparently pledged to measure against everyone alive.
My husband slept beside me through hundreds of those nights. He said later that he always knew the scrolling from the reading, because the scrolling had a rhythm to it, that little flick, flick, flick, like someone dealing themselves losing cards forever.
I was not building a network. I was performing employability for an audience of people performing it right back at me, and we were all applauding each other's performances so that someone would applaud ours.
So: the hospital. My father recovered, mostly, is the first thing you should know. The stroke was moderate, the rehab was long, and his right hand still hesitates at buttons like it is remembering an old argument.
But that night in the vinyl chair, after I put the phone face down, I sat in the dark and conducted the only honest performance review of my year. Somewhere along the way, the feed had stopped being a place I visited and become the place I lived, and everything real, my father's cough, my marriage, my own unemployed and frightened heart, had become raw material. Content in the truest, ugliest sense: stuff to be consumed.
I did not delete the account that night. I want this story to be accurate, not cinematic. I deleted it eleven days later, in the hospital cafeteria, over a coffee the color of rainwater. First I exported my data, because ten years of professional life felt like it should weigh something, and it arrived as a 60 megabyte zip file, which is roughly the size of forty photographs of a sunset. Then the confirmation screen asked if I was sure, and listed everything I would lose, my connections, my endorsements, my recommendations, and I read the list twice and realized it was an inventory of things that had never once sat with me in a hospital.
I pressed delete.
The screen went white, then asked me to log in again... as if it could not believe me.
The withdrawal was real and I will not pretend otherwise. For weeks my thumb kept performing the phantom flick.
I felt professionally invisible, which turned out to be the fear underneath all of it: if I am not being witnessed, do I still count? I had assumed that question had an obvious answer. Sitting with it in the quiet, I found it was worth actually asking, and the answer took months, and the answer was where the good part of this story lives.
Because here is what grew back in the cleared ground. Evenings with my father at rehab, learning the specific patience of watching a proud man relearn buttons, and letting him do it. Real phone calls, the long meandering kind. And, unexpectedly, writing. During one endless waiting room afternoon I found a page of poetry prompts, and one said: write about the last time you felt truly seen. I filled four pages of a pharmacy notebook and cried a little in a plastic chair, and a nurse brought me apple juice without being asked, and that, I remember thinking, that is a network.
The poems kept coming, small ones, mostly about my father, mostly about memory and the strange ache of watching it flicker in someone you love. Eventually I posted one on a community wall for poets, under my real name, and here is the joke the universe told at my expense: I checked for reactions... Twice. Old gods die slowly. But when a comment finally came, it was one stranger saying the poem had made her call her dad, and I noticed the difference in my body immediately. The clapping emoji had always landed like sugar. This landed like bread.
I found work again the analog way, four months later. A former colleague texted me, an actual text, saying she had heard I was free and her team was drowning. No algorithm introduced us. She just remembered I existed, because once, years ago, I had been useful and decent to her in a real office with real air. The network was never the feed. The network was every person who would answer if I called, and that number had not changed by even one when the 2,847 vanished.
My phone charges in the kitchen now. The bedroom stays dark. Some nights I still feel the pull, that itch to check whether the world has ranked me yet, and I lie there and let the feeling pass through like weather... and it does pass. In the dark my husband breathes, the radiator knocks twice, my father is asleep across town with his stubborn right hand, and my actual life, unposted, unwitnessed, unannounced, goes on being entirely mine.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.