Facebook

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Sadly enough, it is true. Recently I became an active member of Facebook. It happened after a childhood friend contacted me. At first I was quite put off, she was after all a bully. What made me reconsider accepting her as a friend was her comment that she had such wonderful memories of me. It took me a while to realize that although she was indeed a bully, I never was her victim. I was also quite curious to find out what these - wonderful memories - could be since I had so very little myself. Almost right away, a flood of old high school buddies started to appear, people who had apparently been looking for me while I was pointlessly in hiding. High school years were good to me and I remember them quite fondly. Once I opened the gates, it was only a matter of time before others showed up.

I reconnected with the girls I used to hang out with, those same girls I had spent countless of hours with, dreaming of the ways we would change the world. Some stayed put, some others moved away, some got married, divorced, some had great career, but none of them had children. What more might we all have had unknowingly in common? I wonder. Although almost thirty years had passed, they all looked more beautiful than ever. The years had not taken its toll of them. However, the same was not true for the guys we used to hang out with. I could hardly recognize any of them. We had countless of times fought against the terrible prejudices that awaited us, future women of the world, but we had never realized how much pressure there was on boys to succeed, to provide, to make things happen, and not all of them had the ability to do so. It was sadly obvious.

I also reconnected with old flames, dear friends, endearing acquaintances, previous neighbors, old colleagues. At first, everybody’s life looked amazing, fulfilling. Gosh, I felt like a looser. How was it that I had done so very little? That is, until I realized that people put up a good front. Their lives were just as ordinary as any other. They put their best pictures up, their best smiles, and hope to convince themselves even more than others.

Some old friends quickly became precious friends again. Some others took the opportunity to use a faraway sounding board to share strenuous details of their lives with someone they had no risk of inadvertently encountering on the streets. Others, the castoffs of those years, those who invested much of their time into successful careers, in an attempt to prove to the world that even then they were worth it, are now investing themselves into fantasies where the past is being avenged by an imaginary present, yet stumbling still on the same rejections.

It is an interesting tool, to observe human behavior certainly, but also to compare, to appreciate the distance traveled. It helped me realize that once upon a time I was amazing, and I lost sight of it during my college years which were in retrospect, truly the worst ones of my life. Even though at first my life felt rather pale in comparison, it turns out that it’s not that bad at all. And as they say, I’m not dead yet, am I.