The Winter of our Disconnect

I was late to board the Facebook train because I felt that the practice of “social networking” was the height of narcissism. Think about it – I create a profile about me. On that profile I post pictures of myself. I share my interests, my accomplishments, my life with the world. I do not merely provide incessant and unsolicited updates to my “friends” about the mundane details of my life; I actually expect them to “like” the banal contents of those updates and comment copiously about my good or bad day, my political candidate of choice, my new addition to my virtual farm, my latest vacation or desire for a vacation.  

Yes, Facebook is the pinnacle of egotism. And yet last winter I joined the half-billion Facebook users around the globe and created my own profile. Here are my thoughts on why, and to what end.

I was lonely. My marriage was dangling precariously over a precipice and my few real friends were absorbed in their own legitimate concerns. Facebook allows us to adopt a nebulous standard for what constitutes a friend. Where previously I’d had two or three, I suddenly had over fifty “friends,” who actually responded to my self-important ramblings and invited me to engage with theirs.

I have always been the odd girl out. There was something peculiarly validating about receiving a “friend request,” on more than one occasion, from one of the popular girls from high school who once teased me relentlessly about my mustache and monobrow. Even more gratifying was accepting her request and learning that she was now fat and wasted and had unsightly facial hair of her own, while my own physical appearance had somewhat improved since those days – particularly because I had learned to wax! But the greatest victory, of course, was that as casually as I had “friended” her, I could now “de-friend” her with the click of my glorious mouse. It was exhilarating to be the rejecter, and not the rejected, for once.

But Facebook is a pitiless mêlée, and no one survives unscathed. I have been de-friended, too. I am never surprised when it happens – the de-friender is usually someone I would never really want to talk to in person. What does astonish me is that it nevertheless produces a pang of…something…in me every time it happens.

I want to know what happened to him. Who among us F-bookers has never scoured the social network in search of an old flame? Liars.

I want to be remembered. I want them to know what happened to me. My fear is not that I will be forgotten, but that I offer nothing to forget. Thus my Facebook profile, and now more so this blog, is a bottle wherein I childishly stuff my scribbles and hurl them into the blue, naively hopeful that someone will find it – and in doing so, find me.

I want to connect. And so do you. My narcissistic musings about nothing in particular are always, at least implicitly, about something in particular. So are yours. Though ostensibly our posts are an extension of our egos, they in fact function as our audacious attempts at extending our hearts beyond our ribcages and into a world resplendent with strange rhythms, in anxious anticipation of finding one that sounds like our own.