The Healing Properties Of Facebook

Okay. So I'm forty years old, married, and I'm an enthusiastic participant on Facebook. I'm comfortable with that, really I am. I do admit however, I was somewhat reluctant to venture into this particular corner of cyberspace. "I mean, aren't those sort of sites for kids?" I said to myself. After all, I'm forty years old and I'm married.Well it took a while after creating my account to get acquainted with how the whole site worked, then the think tank at Facebook decided to change the format that I had just gotten used to. That's a whole other issue. I'm not going there right now. Maybe later. Maybe. Either way, I figured out the new format and I began to navigate around the site to acquire friends. That's what you do on Facebook, make friends.

Thing about that is, to date, I've made over two hundred friends. Some of them are people with whom I'm actually friends with now. Like, as in, currently and in three dimensions. You know, we meet in a diner or at a movie, shake hands, say hi, look each other in the eyes, celebrate birthdays, go fishing, generally hang out, those sort of three dimensions.

Some on my two hundred plus friends are people with whom I've never met. Friends of friends. And that's really cool. I get to meet new people in other countries like Mexico, Canada, Australia (It's a continent, I know), Spain, New Jersey. We can send messages and pictures of ourselves and our mutual friends and kind of tell how our mutual friends' lives touches our lives. "Oh, you know so-and-so from college." "I know so-and-so from work". That sort of thing.

Here's the kicker. Most of my two hundred plus friends are people who I have either met, known or befriended over the course of my forty years of existence on this planet. (Yup, forty. I'm comfortable with that.) The "overwhelm" from all of that kind of crept up on me. In the beginning, it was fun to reconnect with some of my friends in college, then it was a little heavy connecting with my best friends in high school, then it was kinda weird befriending my whole high school class. After that it was time-warpy rediscovering my close friends in jr. high school, then it became a little much hooking up with my whole jr. high school class, then (just yesterday) I was sought out by the guys I hung out with on a teen tour in nineteen-eighty-something. That required me to pause. "Whoa" I thought to myself. ( If you don't know what a teen tour is, just think of it as a 2 month bus ride around the country, as a teenager). Then - and I claim full responsibility for this - I sought out the very first object of my pre-pubescent desire. A cute-as-a button girl, who shall remain nameless to protect her whereabouts, who was my first kiss - my first kiss! (my wife's okay with that, by the way). I needed to walk away from Facebook for a good two weeks after that one.

With each friend acquired, and each area of my life that I conveniently and/or unconsciously compartmentalized, came the pictures. All sorts of pictures. Class pictures - in black & white!, school hallway pictures, college party pictures, and finally the piece de resistance, a picture of me and my afore mentioned first kiss in like nineteen-seventy-blah-blah with my lanky arm around her cute-as-a-button shoulders. We were about eleven years old. It looked like the wardrobe department for That 70's Show exploded all over us.

I've gone about as far back as my memory, and modern photography, can go to literally trace together the different phases of my life. And it all rushes back to me when ever I log in to my account. And you know what? It's all good.

I can look back on my life and see how I've recorded it, how lucky I am to have my family and friends. I can see how my friends have recorded their lives, where they have been, who they are now with, the families they have created and as I do I can see how I had been a part of their lives, who I was when I knew them, who I was when we lost touch and who I am now after we've re-established contact. and I can sincerely say that I've had an outstanding forty years on this planet. (Yup, I'm forty and I'm comfortable with that). All of those forgotten places and forgotten faces are now just a few click away.

It's because of Facebook that I'm able to see the single moments of my whole life strung together and displayed in pixels and wall posts on my computer. My Facebook page is the tableau of my life. And I really like what I see.