The Hazards of Facebook

Some of you may know this about me, some of you may not, but you shall all know now.


Are you curious?



I have an intense love-HATE relationship with Facebook. Emphasis on the HATE.

There. I said it. I feel ever so much better now.

What? You want to know why? Ok.

There are some people out there who have a huge pool of friends. They're social butterflies and they want to keep up with all of those lovely flowers they've flitted in and amongst throughout their life.

I am not one of these people.

I am a woman of few real friends. Some of them lasting, some of them not so much. Many of them intense while they lasted, some of them still intense with a good outlook for lifelong friendship. But I'm not a collector. I don't keep up with people just because we used to be friends once upon a time, or worse, just because we grew up together.

The danger of Facebook is that it gives people the option of pseudo-keeping up with you, even when in reality they never really knew you and don't want to put in any real effort to keep in touch with you.

And WORSE, you succumb, you enlist in the Friend brigade, and then, THEN, you come to KNOW stuff about these people. About what their lives are like NOW. About stuff they've gone through while you were so busy going through your own stuff that you didn't tell them about because you're not really REAL friends anyway.

That was remarkably clear, wasn't it?

Ok. Let me try again.

When I was in school there were girls that I grew up with. They were beautiful and sweet and fun and popular and everyone, EVERYONE loved them. To their light, I was the shadow, the black cloud, the cynic, the pessimist, the glass-half-empty girl, whatever you prefer. And there were certain things that I knew about myself. I knew that would go to college. I knew that I would leave the small town and live somewhere BIG and BUSY. Somewhere where I could be anonymous. I didn't know what I wanted to do or be. I didn't know what my life held in store for me. But I knew those few things.

I find that this overly bright little corner of Georgia reminds me forcefully of those disgruntled high school days. I find myself remembering more. Thinking about them more. Mulling over things I should have said or done differently than I did. Not wanting to go back (oh.please.Heaven.help.me.no just NO.), just wanting the experience itself to have been other than what it was.

And yet.

I am who I am. And I have the life that I have because of the path that I have walked. And who's to say that if I had done things differently back then, I wouldn't have a different life now? And I rather like my life now, so I regret it not at all.

I've been thinking of this girl I grew up with. Beautiful and sweet and popular. Genuinely sweet, everyone's favorite, really. She got married right out of high school. I was such a smarty pants I had her pegged for early marriage, lots of kids, the happy ever so traditional path. But life seldom works out the way we think. Because of the hateful Facebook I know that she had problems in her marriage, never had those kids, divorced and hasn't remarried.

I look around at my wonderful husband, how he loves to be home with us. I have this amazing kid--I wish they could bottle his smile, we'd have a new and sustainable form of energy. I have really lovely friends, who are real friends and stick with me even when I'm not beautiful or sweet or funny. And I can't help but wonder...what did I ever do to deserve such a life? Why me and not her? What was so different about our paths that led us to such completely different places?

These are the games that Facebook plays with my head on a fairly regular basis. Don't get me wrong, I love keeping up with people, I love to read status updates, and Whimsy's open debates with the Chip are routinely hilarious. But some days I sign off, I close my laptop and look around. I feel this overwhelming swell of bittersweetness. I never thought that this would be my life. And I know that my "friends" probably think the same thing, but for different reasons.