(I’m on Facebook a lot). Messenger is genuinely the only way I communicate with my boyfriend; we’ve racked up over 100,000 messages in three years and are expecting a letter from Mark Zuckerberg any day now. But, fine, we painlessly moved our chat to WhatsApp for the week, no big deal. I did miss the Facebook “ping” though – higher pitched than the WhatsApp or text tone.

I very rarely add pictures to Facebook now because of Instagram and I even more rarely get tagged in any. In fact, considering it’s the number one social network, my personal life didn’t suffer at all in the week away from it. This, I have concluded, is because I’ve stopped going to nights like ***LOFT WAREHOUSE PARTY SATURDAY 28th***. Although come to think of it, I kind of miss those nights – as captured in my 2011 album “doing life”.

So, no change to relationship status or social status. The challenge for me was how it affected my work, which was threefold:

1. News. I consume most of my news on Facebook. I follow places like Channel 4, BBC, Vice, Guardian, Mashable, i-D, Dazed, Broadly – pretty much every relevant news and content platform so that I’m aware of which media is covering which story and in what format. Of course, I can consume news in other ways – which I did for the week – like going on the actual websites, reading the push notifications on my phone and going on Twitter a bit. What I missed was the curation. Because what I really want to know when I’m going on Facebook is how my 632 friends are reacting to the world. I have crafted, and heavily edited, this network of 632 people over 12 years and I trust them and their taste absolutely. Them and their taste is how I know when a story is worth covering, writing about, considering. It’s how I learned about the women’s march and the protest Owen Jones instigated on Monday. It’s the first place I go to be in the know.

2. Sharing. I share loads of Refinery29 articles on my wall (is it still called a wall?), either that I’ve written myself or that other people have written for Refinery29. It’s like a constantly moving portfolio of work that is instantly engaging and fed directly to the people I want to reach. I guess it’s free PR, but it’s also a brilliant, non-invasive way of communicating: here’s a link, if it catches your eye, great, if not, carry on. I’ve written loads on mental health for instance and sharing these articles on Facebook has resulted in a lot of amazing and important conversations with friends or acquaintances who have read them.

3. Commissioning. I commission a lot of articles on Facebook, so help me God. A substantial % of my 632 Facebook network are really good journalists, award-winning photographers and very cool people whose opinions are better than journalism anyway. And so I message them on Facebook and ask them to write/ shoot/ contribute, and they message me on Facebook and ask to write/ shoot/ contribute. In the week I was off Facebook, I missed messages from two major editors who wanted to work with Refinery29. I guess when you're available and online, you get good stuff, and when you're not, you miss good stuff.

So to my 632 friends, and my special friend – Facebook – who tells me how it is, I'm lost without you. There's no other platform that archives my youth, my work, my friends, the best nights of my life and all the hundreds of thousands of jokes I've shared with my boyfriend. It's all there, at the click of a button. A week off is fine – what really scares me is the thought that one day, Facebook might get a bug, and crash, and wipe out 12 years of my life. Then there'd really be something to write about.