Hi there Mark, and welcome :-)

You, my friend, are a lucky person to have ended up in life with a beautiful person like @paintingangels as a true friend. Excuse me for starting with saying how lucky you are when clearly life hasn't been to kind for you until recently, but I truly believe you have found a good place to find these "collaborators" (although I'm afraid I'm gonna have to follow you to ;-))

I laughed with joy and understanding when I read:

"...the general suckitude of Facebook."

You come across as an erudite and well-balanced person, so I'm sure I'm telling you nothing new when I say you should be glad and proud to have shaken off that Facebook addiction. I never had a Facebook account, but my girlfriend, my son, my sister... everybody I know, come to think of it, waste a lot of their time and energie there. When I see the average post on facebook, when I accidentally look over the shoulder of girlfriend or son, I become very sad...

People on Facebook act like commercials. What too few people realize is that commercials are not made to make you happy, even if they're full of smiling, happy people who don't seem to have a care in the world... The trick is; commercials paint an exceedingly beautiful picture, with exceedingly happy and abnormally beautiful people to keep you, the customer UNHAPPY. For if you were happy, you'd have no wants, there wouldn'd be any reason to go out and buy brand X...

People do the same with the picture they paint of themselves on Facebook: they generally share their happiest moments, their most beautiful pictures, tell about their greatest successes... On Facebook the people ARE the brand X's that are trying to sell themselves, not realizing they only make life miserable for others and eventually themselves.

Very few people do the opposite. Very few people have the guts to do the opposite and make themselves vulnerable in their quest for a shred of honesty in this over-commercialized, over-individualized world we live in. Like @paintingangels I have nothing but respect for you and this honest, beautiful first post. You might not want to hear this, but Steemit works a bit like Facebook: what you put in, you get out of it. Problem with Facebook is that the input consists mainly of fake sales-pitches of people who are better at hiding how broken they are themselves. You'll see that the input here differs a lot from that, so what comes out is different to.

Okay... I'm ranting again... sorry for the amount of words... It's late...

That was way too much words to say: Welcome Mark! Glad you came here and left Facebook! Looking forward to future posts ;-)