Facebook Healed My Soul

Your past lives in a room in Santa Clara, California. There every person and place you ever knew resides inside boxes of semiconductors and wires, pulsing among the heat sinks, interfaces and mother boards of ten-thousand single-minded machines waiting to serve this living, breathing, venerable data to anyone you desire and anyone who desires you. For some of you, this room may be in Dublin, Ireland. For me, it might be in Ashburn, Virginia. But for sure, one of these rooms holds a link to our pasts and to the history of just about everyone know. And Facebook is the keeper of the keys to these rooms in these places where our pasts reside.

Now, if you listen the buzzing hive of media, you’ll hear that there are those among us who feel that having Facebook oversee our past and, likewise, be able to connect us through these data centers to people and places long gone from our lives (or for that matter to 400 million other people we never knew or never wanted to know in the first place) is an invasion of our privacy. Still others of us believe that being able to share ourselves with old friends and lovers – to relive old acquaintances and cash in on long banked emotions – gives us a second chance at a life that may not currently be as satisfying as we’d like. But me, I can tell you that having been able to see the people who have emerged from my past through Facebook - to reencounter them today and roam a while in the lives they have lived since I once knew them - has helped me to love my life as I am living it more than I could ever have hoped. I may have been floundering in that mid-life half state where a man questions the choices he has made and looks at much of what he has created as mistakes or dam lies, but let me tell you that seeing who has emerged digitally out of my past and into my present has once and for all shut my cranky mouth and sent me to my knees, prostrate in thanks for the life I have created.

In short, Facebook healed my soul.

Consider the types of men and women who have found me and who might try to find you . . .

There will be that woman whom we dated the sweltering summer between high school and college when the heat from the rotting sky burnt the lake beaches into tar as we snuggled on the shore, baking both of us into a single brick of desire. This woman we remember so fondly for her large breasts and her lean, flexible legs, for her sharp comebacks and her soft tongue, this woman is now divorced with two children who call her names as they raid her purse and an ex husband who can currently only abuse her through the phone when she calls him to beg for the money a judge ordered him to pay. This old flame of ours is swimming in the flotsam of Facebook looking for anyone from the past to cling to (anyone whom she recalls with a tender heart), and that anyone – for the moment – is me (and you).

There will be that sheltered, neighborhood momma’s boy whom our dull-witted gang of street thugs said was a retard and whom Facebook now tells us has become the idiot savant of our home town’s financial district, making himself, his family and many of his supplicants rich. This grown man, whose recent photo still shows the cowlick and forced picture smile he had in grammar school, is “just connecting with old friends” through a mass emailing meant to seize our hearts with regret and shame us into ever doubting him (or his mother, whom still lives with him) in the first place. Will we bite and then chew out the center of our own chests trying to free ourselves from the trap of envy he has set?

And, if these two aren’t enough, there will be another woman who finds us, a real beauty whom we could only look at but who would never let us touch her in grammar school or high school or even at the community college where she seemed to follow us like bait trolling on the end of a fish hook. She’s been married and divorced and married and divorced again and the special comment she put on our Facebook page tells us that we were “always so cute . . .” and asks if we are the same person she thinks we are. Don’t worry, guys, we still won’t be able to get to her through the retinue of admirers bedazzled by her supple high heels, perfect mask of makeup and tight little black dresses. And even if we do get her we won’t have her for long. Yet still we will long for her for a long, long time in the illuminated night of our laptop screens.

Perhaps it will be that superhero, high school jock teammate of ours who will pop up from the past through California or Virginia or Ireland to send us a Facebook message telling us that - now that he’s lost his house and wife and kids from drug and sex and gambling addictions - he’s found Jesus. And, Jesus, he’d really like to see us again but first he has to clear out this little 90 day stretch in the state pen for a couple of parole violations. “After that, would you like to get together?” Well, would we? Huh?

Or maybe finally (for now) it will be someone just like the rest of us who will present themselves smiling on our message boards, someone with a life similar to ours – a man or woman who’s kept their head above water all these years and whose only fault lies in never doing enough for themselves as they nurture their kids and grow old with their spouses. Now that’s someone we could relate to, right? Surely this person, with their sense of civic duty, 2-3 ambitious kids and clean house, is a person whose past we would feel comfortable in. “It looks like you and I share so much,” he or she tells us, “And here’s my cell number because I’d love for you to call me ....”

And call them all we should. And call them all I did. And in seeing them all again I realized one astonishing fact - I realized that if I took these pasts that came tumbling out at me from those servers that Facebook banks on, and I put them in a pile among the pieces of my own life, I would pull my life today out of that heap in less time than it took to click delete.

It’s not that I’ve lost love for these people or that I envy or mock their lives - In fact I love them all the more now for finding me and sharing the pains and joys of this beautiful human existence that we all find ourselves trapped within. It’s just that, whether they have lived well or not, whether their lives are the mirror image of mine or whether they have fallen through the looking glass into a dusky, wonderland of their own, their lives are simply not my life.

Those people from my past could never have created this family I have made in just the way I have made it, they could not have had the same dark nights of the soul that I have had with exactly the same terrors to survive, nor could they have done it all as right or as wrong in precisely the same ways that I have thrived and blundered. And that is something to be proud of, and that is why I would never trade lives or go backwards with any of them. No matter what Facebook leads me to believe by serving this past to me, my life is precious simply because it is mine and mine alone.

After all, our pasts may live in a room in some far off place, but our futures exist only in the lives we live today. And that is enough for any man to Face.