There appears to be a renaissance of early fortysomethings on Facebook. More and more frequently, I am finding or am found by random and not-so-random people I used to drink, study (ha), room, or hang out with. It’s fun, but it’s also kind of new. You’re sort of re-introducing the (hopefully) new and improved you to people you haven’t seen in 20 years.
What will yield from this fruitful situation?
I mean, all of these blasts from the past are kind of intense. You go on this journey into your history, and it’s already highly biased, since memory is so damn fallible, and of course you’re going to remember highlights and lowlights and not the mundane, everyday shit that someone else might remember really well because it was a big deal to them and not to you. What do you think these old friends are contacting you for? Do you think they have secret, unrequited things to say, or are they just jazzed because you’re one more feather in their Facebook friend cap? Or is it something far more nuanced than that? I suspect that it is.
What’s the protocol on Facebooking old friends? (yes, I used it as a verb) How far back do you go? And when college friends reach out to you (and you aren’t currently IN college) what do you say after the hi, how have you been for the past 20 years? It’s kind of a lot to summarize. I’ve found that initially I have lots of questions for the new/old friend, but I don’t know where to begin, so I read their synopsis of the past two decades, write mine, and then we kind of fade out. That doesn’t mean I WANT to fade out, but sometimes you realize you don’t have much in common. Other times, you are happily reconnected and chat when you see the little green circle advertising your friend’s availability.
People from your past are fascinating, though, because they have frozen in time in your memory of them whenever you knew them. It’s still hard to get your head around the fact that these people have gone out with different people, gotten drunk in different cities, taken and left jobs, people, situations, dramas. It’s really hard to wrap your mind around that, I think.
Plus when I see photos of these old college friends, I am amazed at how much they look like the young adults they were back in the day. I may look the same, too, for all I know, but I surely don’t feel the same. There was a lot of shit going on for me in those days that I didn’t even know about. I imagine that is probably true for all of these people, too. We present one face in public and sometimes (usually) a vastly different one inward.
I just got back in touch with an old friend who’s now a doctor. Not just a regular doctor. An emergency specialist. He has his own clinic. He’s very successful and clearly had the chops to get to where he is today. But when I knew him, he was a fun-loving goofy guy who partied a lot and was well-liked by everyone. You can never know someone's future. And you can really only vaguely know someone's past.
Worth pondering.
We're all older and hopefully wiser now, and where does that leave us? Still yearning for days gone by, as an old friend said, "when we were cool." Going back in time isn't possible except for the good-looking actors on Lost and Heroes, but even if we could, would we? I can tell this is a whole other post unto itself. The going-back-or-not-and-if-you-did-what-would-you-do-musing.
Because it is possible to be happy where you are and wistful for where or who you were, even though your memory's shoddy and you probably wouldn't like going back to whatever you were/had. It's the not knowing that causes some deep thinking.
That's the whole nature of being human, though. Do you suppose tree sloths think this way? Or are they just living in the moment, chilling in the jungle, happy with their present moment?
And the Oscar Goes to. . . .Yawn
2 years ago
It is so true! At first I was excited to get back in touch with old friends but it turns out you just swap laundry lists. It was kind of like getting a sense of where you are in life in juxtaposition to where these others ended up. It almost got depressing because I quickly came to realize that everything changes and people stay the same. There was probably a reason the friendship faded in the first place and now it has to refade (is that a word?). In any case I no longer am on Facebook and leave it to my imagination for what happened to my friends, they in turn can wonder about me...maybe I'm a Dr. with my own clinic?
ReplyDeleteI choose to find it reassuring. I mean, look at how SUCCESSFUL some people from one's past turn out to be: Emergency medical doctors with their own clinics, college professors, PARENTS!!!! The sad part is often to realize how successful you have (or have not) been in a relative way. You may have a wonderful family and envy your old friend's career, or vice versa. Still, though, the generally successful path of these newfound old friends is something to be thankful for. Plus, it's just that many more potential blog readers!!!
ReplyDeleteI like "one more feather in facebook friend cap"... Nice turn of phrase. I think it might be all about that. I did have a real live face-to-face reunion with some facebook friends a year ago and I found it interesting. I loathe Facebook, and yet it is strangely addictive....
ReplyDeleteI think it depends on why you're using a tool like Facebook. There are some people with whom I was in the middle of a conversation and they moved - geographically and maybe psychologically, too. It's also human to scuttle down a hole and think we'll change by popping out of the ground somewhere else. We're not leaving to escape that conversation I was talking about; we're leaving to escape ourselves and make ourselves anew. Of course, it never works out that way, though with experience and awareness we hopefully come to accept ourselves and others a little better. And when we have and we remember the conversation we were having with a friend, we suddenly experience the urge to continue it. We think time has past, but nothing has past, anymore than the time we had 'back then' was ever really frozen solid. Really, it never was what we thought it was even when we thought we knew what it was...
ReplyDeleteTo have the conversation, you have to push beyond memories and the shopping list and dare to ask questions that invite the other person, now standing someplace else in the current of their life, to sit at your table. When you do this, it is impodrtant not worry so much about whether people will accept the new you. They will accept you because they never rejected you; they accepted you even back in the days when you couldn't accept yourself. In any case, your life goes on and yet in essence you are that same unique person - maybe a little more aware, a little better equipped and a lot less severe a judge of yourself and others, but still that person. If this conversation is their intention, then let them in and discover them not as the bearers of the baggage of your past, but as people who have always been there and who have simply popped back into your kitchen through the miracle of the Internet. A conversation is never one thing or about one thing. It is fluid and can be resumed at any time.