When I heard of Muhammad Ali's death on Saturday a wave of blessed relief washed over me. Not that I wished the poor man any harm - far from it. I just knew that I would avoid the inevitable sickly torrent of shared grief because, last week, I finally deactivated my Facebook account.It was a long time coming. I'm a survivor, oh yes I am, but I'm just not emotionally strong enough for Facebook, which, I have concluded after years of in-depth research, is just one great big blue-and-white boasting competition.Every time I logged on I was confronted by the amazing concerts that my friends were attending. The fabulous trips they were taking (sometimes, even, with live video of the pool-side sodding bar). Their squadrons of amusingly captioned children, all so cute and winsome . and ghoulish. And, worst of all, my friends' perfect husbands, their wedding photos served up with as much regularity as a Djokovic ace (and just as devastating).Then came the celebrity deaths. The Pavlovian weeping and wailing and despair, all for the loss of singers and actors who'd never once been mentioned when they were alive. Purple profile pictures for Prince. No mention of the fact that Bowie was always a bit shrieky. A posthumous Oscar for Alan Rickman? Come on.And the politics. Oh, the endless left-wing politics. The essays beatifying junior doctors, the "38 Degrees" petitions to have this and that outlawed, the looping videos of the enlightened as they save the world. And all delivered with the unflappable certainty of someone who's having a chat with Jesus, despite having just been sectioned.Here's the thing. I don't have a perfect husband (or indeed any husband, or the remotest sniff of a bloody husband). I'm nearly 48 and concerts are far too loud for me. Children test my patience, and pool-side bars make me itch. I mourned Victoria Wood a little, but briefly and privately, and I'm so right-wing that I make Donald Trump look like Bob Crow. I work from home and don't get out much. Yes, I am that middle-aged gay with two cats and an addiction to home-shopping on TV. And I like to meditate, which doesn't really make for a great selfie.This is a world that prizes extroversion above all things. So I would log on to Facebook and, every time I logged off again I'd be feeling just a little worse. Just a little less. Poetically, perhaps, just a little blue.My mental health is hard-won and fiercely defended - and, in person, my amazing friends are the special forces who help me hold that line. When they come to my flat for dinner, they don't rock up manically waving holiday snaps and ostentatiously snogging their new boyfriends. So why do people behave like that on Facebook?Imagine, just for an emoticon-free moment, what Facebook would be like if we were all 100% honest, 100% of the time. If we shared not just our joys and our triumphs but our self-doubt and our worries. That's what it's like when I see my friends in real life - and we all take inspiration and strength from hearing how everyone else manages to cope, no matter how grim life gets.I'm the third person I know to swear off Facebook this year. Perhaps we should band together, and set up our own antisocial social network. With a lot of mutual support, we might all one day be strong enough to log back on to Facebook. - ©The Daily Telegraph..