Unfriended....

I found myself thinking of an old friend today.

When I got home I popped her name into Facebook just to see what she'd been up to.  We have been "friends" on Facebook for probably the last 10 years. Six years ago she found a new job, and our friendship became very much hit or miss, but I did check in with her every so often.  Somewhere around the 2008 election I hid her husband from my news feed, not because I didn't like him, but because I didn't like the hatefulness in which he was expressing his political opinion.  About 3 years ago, I hid her from my news feed.  Her marriage had exploded (again), and while I reached out to her in a real way, offering an ear, breakfast, coffee, she never took me up on it.

Which was okay.  I get it.  When you are in that moment, you don't always want company.  She chose to stay in her marriage, to work things out (again).  And while I don't judge her for her choice, I worried for her as my friend, that the 5th time would become the 6th...7th... It's tough to watch someone stay on an emotional roller coaster by choice, but it wasn't my choice to make, and I can respect her decision.

Anyway, today I popped her name into my FB and she was gone.  I'd been unfriended.  Ironically we still have 5 mutual friends, people she also has very little contact with, but yet she unfriended me. Now, we haven't talked in 3 years.  We are in very different places in our lives.  We have very little in common.  My husband is not a huge fan of our friendship because of the drama that is ever going on in her life.

And yet, the unfriending bothers me.

Then I got to wondering who else was still left in my news feed.  Ironically, I am either tied to most of them through Scouts, work, or the internet. A quarter of my "friends" I have never met. I have hidden another quarter of the list from my feed, and I find myself enjoying my unknown friends more than the known ones. It slowly started to come to me that it's not about the people in my list, it's about the connection that Facebook assumes that you have. The other half of my feed is advertisements now. So if I'm not feeling crappy about not being able to see an old friend's life, or smirking over a completely fake joyous post of someone I know is outright miserable, I am constantly being reminded of how I can "heal my foot pain", or get cured of my diverticulitis.

What am I doing?

I really hate Facebook.  I hate the time it takes up.  I took the app off my phone, and yet sadly I find myself checking in in other ways.  I hate the way it portrays everyone's life as perfect, and yet often through over-posting, pathetic.  I hate the way a friend's post about how wonderful her husband is about staying with her 7 hours in the ER makes me think "Oh, nice" and "Wait?  Isn't that what a husband is supposed to do?"  all at the same time.

What I hate most of all, is that realistically, I can't just deactivate my account right now.

Facebook messes with the mind, folks.  It will make you crazy.

In truth, I don't want to reconnect with her face to face,  I just wanted to know that she was okay. Which she is of course, she's just doing her own thing.  As am I. Who knows why she unfriended me.  Maybe she was just surrounding herself with like minded people. Maybe she thought I'd judge her for staying. Maybe she just didn't want my non-sugar coated thoughts on things. Which makes me think she may have never even known me at all.  Or maybe, like myself, she too looked at my random posts and felt conflicted, like I was trying to portray something that wasn't my reality.

Or maybe, it was just time for us to finally be done with our time together.  Maybe our friendship had run it's course, and the connection through Facebook had perpetuated it way past it's time. Like a life support that continues to breath life into something that the plug should have been pulled on long ago.