Facebook is fun. Yes, it’s frustrating with the rule changes and shifting privacy settings and all that, but it’s free and gives us a chance to connect with other people and talk about ourselves and it’s fun.
It also has another amazing benefit. Facebook allows us to re-introduce ourselves to each other as the people we are now. You know how sometimes, 20 years after high school or college, you see people you hung out with back then and think, “Wow, we would never be friends if we met today.” Until social media came along, that was all there was. A realization that you’d outgrown people you used to like.
Social media now gives us the flip side of the equation. Growing into the people you never knew. I am getting to know people through Facebook and this blog that I had nothing to do with in high school and college, some I even actively disliked – sometimes for the stupidest reasons (one because she dated a boy right after he and I broke up, and another because our sororities didn’t like each other – boy, does that one ever make me feel idiotic), and I’m discovering that they are AWESOME! I adore these women.
We weren’t people who would have liked each other back then, but we have become people who have a lot in common now, and whose youth-driven garbage has all been shed like so many layers of dead skin. I know there are people who didn’t like me, and probably still don’t, because of the person I was when I was 16, and that’s fine. But I feel sorry for anyone who doesn’t look at everyone in the present and say, “Yep. You’re my kind of people. Today.” Regardless of the past.
