The Power of Facebook

Facebook has been in the news lately, warning us that we may all be laying our sorry selves open to identity fraud. I can't honestly see who might be interested in using the details I've included seeing as they are mostly ridiculous, but the identity fraud thing is one of the reasons I resisted it for so long. I also have been known to avoid buying/taking part in/wearing/reading/doing anything that I feel people are doing just because everyone else is doing it.

I avoided facebook for a long time, simply because everyone was on it and I wasn't, but alas, I gave in eventually. The initial experience of finding all kinds of people on Facebook and being able to talk to them and find out about how they're doing was exciting. It's nice to update the pictures you have in your head of people you knew from years back. It's also borderline stalking, considering you can look up people who have a less than favourable presence in your memory banks and see if they look as worse for wear as you hope they do. But my discovery has been better than this.

I have all kind of memories of people at school, who at the ages of 13, 14 and 15, were capable of what I remember as being indescribable cruelty. I was picked on because I wore Clarks shoes instead of Kickers, which were cool but expensive beyond what my parents would allow, I carried a denim rucksack which I decorated with fabric paints instead of a record shoulder bag like everyone else. These crimes of taste and my comparative quietness and sensitiveness meant I was pretty much a sitting duck for verbal, flicking and pushing attacks and all kinds of one offs such as torn up paper dandruff dropped on my head!

Grudges had built up in my mind primarily because of the other kids' behaviour towards me and my friends, twinned with the fact that they were usually seen as "spirited and lively characters" who got good grades and were teachers favourites, and so never got what I felt should be coming to them. (I fantasized usually at least a good verbal dispute where I could tell them how morally pitiful they were, triumphantly winning back my dignity, which would stump them into respecting me forever - LAME!!! of course it wouldn't have worked. I would have been toast.)

But Facebook has enabled me to see how everyone has leveled out, and how my status, such as it is, is totally different. We're all equal, and people who I thought were totally unaware of my existence have turned out to remember me better than I remembered them...which makes me think that I possibly wasn't so great myself, maybe too wrapped up in avoiding the people I was afraid of to notice that there were plenty of other nice people. So I'm quite pleased Facebook exists, because it has let me put my stupid and frankly absurd bruises from the past behind me, which is a blessed relief.

Next post to follow later... brace yourselves to give me fashion advice... hummm...

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