On Oct. 19, 2009, I found out that I was pregnant. From my Facebook profile.

Yes, I was one of those people, the ones WHO classily announce their pregnancies online. After all, I am a classy person.

However, the status update informing friends and family about my delicate situation was neither written by me, nor truthful.

Have I mentioned that I’m classy? Because the following statement will most likely refute that fact.

“Mackenzie would like to annonce that she is 8 wks pregnant!!!!” This is verbatim.

Yes, I was one of the approximately 24,600 people to have their accounts hacked in 2009. Of course, that’ s just an estimate, based off of a Time Magazine article.

Within minutes of the message’s posting, I received dozens of texts, asking if there had been an Immaculate Conception, part deux.

It’s nice to have your friends think you can’t get any. Which I’m actually OK with: Good-girl reputations don’t come easily.

Unfortunately, my response was hardly ideal. I sent out a mass text, consisting of two words:

“Not pregnant!”

Classy, right? Even better, I didn’t check who the message was sent to, so everyone got it.

My RHT 160 professor? Message delivered! The guy I crushed on in high school, but never told? He thinks I’m a psycho. PR manager to the All-American Rejects? Well, I’m sure she’s used to getting those messages.

With one text, I did more damage to my reputation that one Facebook update ever could. On Oct. 20, I disabled my profile, and haven’t accessed it since.

I’ve never done drugs, so I’m not familiar with withdrawal symptoms, but I’m 99 percent sure I experienced them.

Each time I hung out with friends, I asked for the latest Facebook gossip. Without them, I’d never know that the slutty girl from high school left her husband of one year who then began a relationship with her twin sister.

I would also never know that my brother broke up with his girlfriends.

Yes, I wrote that correctly. Apparently, the girls were OK with an awkward polygamous relationship. It’s like living in an episode of “Big Love.”

However, if I hadn’t left Facebook, I would never have discovered the joy in other areas of the Internet.

I learned that you can read books online. For free, too. I stopped paying for books.

Then I found Perez Hilton, a celebrity gossip blogger so mean that I became a nicer person after reading his posts. After that, I stopped buying “People” magazine.

Later, I realized that Lamebook.com could give me a Facebook fix, but only with the funniest and stupidest things from my once-favorite site. I had no need to use my own profile.

Most recently, I found Twitter, a micro-blogging site that allows users to post constant status updates. It’s like Facebook, but less of my friends are on it.

Fast forward to today. I’m in the third trimester of a phantom pregnancy, and in a good place.

Gone are the days I would waste on Facebook, stalking high school crushes in hopes of finding messages subliminally directed at me. (Love you too, Carl!)

I’m past creeping on photos of people having way more fun than me, especially when I could go out and have the same amount of fun.

Yup, a pregnancy scare was the best thing to ever happen to me.