CXV – On Seeing a Ghost

I graduated highschool nearly a decade ago. When I was in highschool, I did many of the things that highschoolers do, like socialize, chase after girls, and participate halfheartedly in recreational clubs. I didn’t do some of the things that many highschoolers do, like drink or smoke or go to parties. This last habit of mine meant I spent a lot of time with bookish types and misfits, and I was comfortable there.

The advent of Facebook during my educational years was a poor development. Facebook was deleterious to my health–or at least, the way I used it was. I spent a lot of time with my bookish types and misfits, and so my Facebook was initially populated by those. Then, as is the impulse, my circle there expanded to people I have spoken to at least once. It became a method of harvesting people who are loosely connected. This has the advantage of making one feel popular, and the disadvantage of making all ones actual friends (those bookish types and misfits) seem distant by association. My news feed swelled with other people doing fun things, like drinking, smoking, and going to parties.

I realized the problem at some point during this time. I read an article that talked about how it was impossible to have more than 150 meaningful relationships. I looked at my Facebook list of 300+ strangers and decided enough was enough. This is the time I became very sensitive and embarrassed about my past. When I was wasting time on the internet and using social media (which they would have us believe is called “socializing”), my favorite past time became taking content I had previously blasted into the aether and putting it down the memory hole. I began deleting past posts and removing Facebook connections. Over the next couple years, I got down to 150, then 50, then 28 connections. Then I deleted my Facebook.

I deleted it after using it in much the same unhealthy way through my undergraduate career. I contented myself after that point that I was in touch with everyone I cared to be in touch with, and this was true. I also believe it’s healthy: Facebook encourages both unrelenting connection to strangers and inordinate focus on the past, and neither of those I consider healthy personality traits.

My band of bookish types and misfits, I supposed, were in touch with everyone they cared to be in touch with as well, and we all contented ourselves with being in separate circles and not knowing what the other was up to.

These are all things that came back to me when I was eating brunch and playing cribbage with my friend after Mass in a quaint local coffee shop. I saw two of that number of bookish types and misfits from 10 years ago enjoying brunch together. I resolved to go say hello, and they just about fell out of their chairs. We caught up on what we are all doing these days, and I learned that many of that band of bookish types and misfits are living in and around my area. I explained why I probably seemed dead, and we exchanged contact information, and now it’s highly likely that, through them, I’ll reconnect with those bookish types and misfits whom I spent my time with as a younger man.

All this filled me with something like nostalgia. It made me very glad that time blurs details of my past self of whom I’m not particularly proud. It made me glad that I may be reconnecting with these folks after having become more settled in who I am and what I’m all about. Nostalgia means painful longing for home, that’s not quite what this is. Colloquially it’s “fond remembrance of times past”, and it’s not quite that either. It’s what I imagine it’s like to be looking down from Heaven, checking in on friends and relations from time to time to see what they’ve been up to; like returning to Earth as a friendly ghost to see what you’ve missed in the time you’ve been away.

AMDG