A Social Mirror

I have been severely neglecting my blog, no surprise there. I suppose for whatever reason I've been lacking in inspiration and feeling incredibly unmotivated to just sit and think -- not that I've been at a loss for time. I don't like not being in school, not having a specific time and place in which I must engage intellectually and exercise that big muscle inside my skull. It's so strange to miss something that I've only wished to escape the past 17 years of my existence. I've been considering going back to school part-time to get a psychology or counseling degree, instead of taking the bigger step of pursuing my MSW. Spending that much time and money on something so uncertain scares me too much. I just feel that I desperately need intellectual stimulation and am not sure how else to get it. I miss learning, the opportunity to be taught, to grow and expand my understanding of my world.

Anyway, that's not at all what I wanted to blog about. I don't actually know what to blog about. My mind is running in a million different directions, so bare with me and hope that something other than complete and utter word vomit comes out. I think that one of my many New Year resolutions will be to set aside at least half an hour every day to just sit by myself, with some good music on, and think, blog if so inspired, but if not, just take the time to contemplate life, goals, questions...anything. Once again, not what I really wanted to blog about.

A few weeks ago I walked into the room to find my husband on the couch scrolling through pages and pages of his 500-something friends on Facebook. I asked him what he was doing. He replied that he was deleting "friends" that he didn't talk to, didn't know or just didn't want having access to his information. I kind of laughed at him and watched, amused and asking him to explain each and every decision about whether or not to maintain cyber friendship with a particular individual. Most of his reasons centered around his job and the importance of confidentiality and controlling what information was available to which people, etc. The result was a friend list that had decreased by 300 or 400 people. I didn't really think much more about it.

However, tonight after he went to bed, I sat on the couch and found myself looking through my 500 friends on facebook. I began to think about the people I was "friends" with. There wasn't anyone that I had never personally met or had some type of relationship with. But a great deal of the people I hadn't spoken to in four and a half years, some much longer. Some of them I had never really spoken to, other than a brief introduction or forced awkward conversation. Some of them I didn't even like! So many of them I had absolutely no justification for "friendship" -- however superficial it may be. I decided it was time to downsize. If I wouldn't even say hello to these people if I passed them on the street, they certainly didn't need to have access to all of this information about me. Chances are I probably sent them a friend request simply to look at them since I last saw them and compare myself to them, to see how I measured up I suppose. And so I began the sorting process.

Some of them -- family, close friends, best friends -- were no-brainers. Others, ex-coworkers, other Marine wives, etc. I kept for networking purposes. The peculiar thing was that there were very few, if any, "friends" that I was not at all hesitant to remove. My strategy was to look through the mass of names and faces and ask myself for each one: if I were to spot this person on the street or in a bar I would I go up to them and say hi? If yes, I'd keep them. If no, then I removed them. But for some reason that I still cannot explain, people that I absolutely knew I would not say hi to I was incredibly hesitant to remove. People from high school or college that I knew of, but never spoke to, were so hard to delete from my life. It was like if I clicked that delete button, that person was just erased from my life, gone as if they never existed. And while it is very possible that that particular person had very little or no impact on my life, I found myself afraid of forgetting them.

Maybe it is because years from now I want to be able to know what became of them. Maybe I want to be able to look at them and see that I've done something better with my life. Maybe I want them to be able to look at me so I can shout "Ha! Look at me! Look how great my life is!" Whatever the reason may be, I realize that my motivation for requesting their Facebook friendship and maintaining it is completely and thoroughly selfish.

Once again I'm faced with the reality of just how much I care about what people think. It's disgusting. I have this insatiable need to compare myself to other people. People I don't even know, people I've never even had a conversation with. It's ridiculous and juvenile. I can't figure out why it is so important to me, why I can't just focus on being who I want to be - and more importantly who God wants and intended me to be. It really does not matter in the slightest what the guy I sat next to in biology in 10th grade thinks about me. And yet I cling to some superficial "friendship" on a social networking website. It's just bizarre. I wish I knew how to shake this, but I don't. I've been trying to for so long, but comparing myself to other people just seems to be so ingrained in my everyday life, it's almost subconscious.

So that's what's on my mind tonight. I don't really know of any eloquent way to conclude. I wish I could conclude with some means of combating my bad habit, resulting from deep meditation and thinking. But that's not the case. So I guess I will say wish me luck on my endeavors to find a solution to this inconvenience, and bid you all good night.