Facebook as Source of Healing
When I decided to join Facebook, I did it on a whim, having no idea how important it would become. Yes, it's a total distraction and I have to be careful about all the applications. Yes, there are a number of people who have friended me who I don't really need to know and in fact barely ever knew anyway. But it has brought me back into touch with my Sewanee friends. That alone is an amazing gift. These people, many of whom have been lost to me, are now keeping in touch. Not only do I hear little snippets about their lives, but I can read them interacting with each other as they make posts, and it's a little taste of what life was like in college - all that witty banter, the crazy humor, the support when someone's down. In a way Sewanee has been restored to me in the virtual world. Is it the same as being with those people every day? No. But it's a little taste of it, and it brings me joy. It also makes the single priesthood just a little less lonely.
Facebook also keeps me in touch with my Seabury friends, so I don't have to lose them in the way that I lost many of my Sewanee friends. It has also brought me back in touch with some of my theatre friends, including those from high school who I haven't been in touch with in over 20 years. I miss theatre people. There's a wackiness that you mostly don't find in church people. At least not when they're in church.
But one of the biggest gifts of Facebook has been a couple of friends who were lost to me because of a falling out. For a long time I've either carried guilt or anger towards them because of the way our friendship dissolved. I didn't know how to work for reconciliation with people who I no longer had contact with. Now we're friends on Facebook, and though the true reconciliation of meeting and sharing conversation and working through old hurts may never happen, it's a start. On one level it's superficial, but at the same time, the mere fact of returning to some kind of connection with these people is having a healing effect on me. Thanks, Facebook.
posted by Merely Human @ 7:11 AM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
how true! i said the same thing yesterday (very likely about the same individual) as i sent off an email to someone's whose last words to me i remember being, "i never want to see you or talk to you again." and yet, this week, they sent me a message saying "please be my friend." i needed that old chapter of pain and hurt i have carried around for so long closed, and sent off a very honest note, basically saying, wow, this is where we last left off, now thins, excuse me while my head spins. but it felt so good to be 20 years down the road from something, toss out our memories of our old immature selves, step over it, and reconnect. not what i was expecting from that site at all.
I've found the same thing to be true... amazing, isn't it? I was talking to Valerie yesterday and making the comment that in many ways the NEXT HS reunion may be more fun because of the reconnections on facebook - and I had a blast at the last one!
"The mere fact of returning to some kind of connection with these people is having a healing effect on me."
For future use (with your previous post in mind). That'll preach.
Peace out.
L+
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