Open Letter fo My Friends

Recently, I joined Facebook, a social networking site. I had never much interest in these sorts of things, until an old friend from High School contacted me via this medium. I had a little experience with MySpace and found it to be too cumbersome and slow, so I never really got into it. Through Facebook, whose features seem more streamlined and actually useful than MySpace, I was able to connect with family and friends as well as find old friends. It’s a marvelous tool for helping people stay in touch and stay in touch at a level heretofore unknown. In addition to sharing photos, movies, likes and dislikes, you can share all the subtle nuances that go on in our day to day lives, such as what are you thinking or doing at this moment and other small tidbits of personal information, through surveys such as “44 odd/random things about me”.

Part of the appeal of Facebook and other such programs is the ability to find and communicate with old friends from the past, like people with whom you went to High School. It was this part of my Facebook journey that struck me as personally poignant.

One of the features of Facebook it helps you contact people you may know, making suggestions for you, based on who you email, and it displays your ‘Friends” in a little box on your home page. Just like in reality, no one on Facebook wants to be seen as not having friends and indeed some people have hundreds. It seems that part of the goal on Facebook is to “collect friends” regardless of how much a person really is your ‘friend”. I was even contacted by people with whom I work and asked to be their Facebook friend, even though I do not socialize with them at all.

Thus, I too began my journey to collect friends. A journey not unfilled with some difficulty. Whereas I struggled to get up towards 20 friends, people I know who joined Facebook after me soon had many more friends than I…. and this bothered me. Thus, it caused me to reflect on my status with respect to my ‘social network”.

Part of my difficulty in accumulating Facebook Friends stems from the fact that I come from a small family, so “check”, less people there in my life to count on as a Friend. Another issue is that some of my closest friends from “back in the day” are now dead or have dropped of the grid entirely. Thus, “check”, yet another reason why my Friends count is challenged.

But it was when I reached out to old friends from the past that I had a bit of a revelation and that was, I may not have been a very good friend! I was not super popular in High School, but I had a small core group of close friends; we even called ourselves the “Famn Damily”. However, over the years many of these people drifted away from me, or perhaps more correctly said, I drifted away from them. Through ego and self preoccupation, I let people I cared about disappear from my life. Even worse, while I imagined that I was the receiver of many a slight from some so-called friends, the perspective of the past 20 years reveals to me, that I was not that kind either and in some cases, I may have been down right mean.


I’m not sure why I was this way. Perhaps, it’s the nature of kids to be this way, or perhaps I was making up for some shortcoming elsewhere, or perhaps I have softened as the years go by. I don’t know, I am still on this journey; trying to figure out the reasons for what I have come to learn about myself.

Regardless of what I discover, I have made a personal commitment to try and be a better friend, in person and not just on Facebook; to be less self-absorbed and more attuned to others needs. Thus, I say to you, if you are reading this and you are a friend of mine, please accept my apology if I have not been the best of friends to you and please know that, while I may have appeared to be self centered, I care about you deeply. Thank you for being there for me, thank you for being my friend.