Treasure Your Past: Finding Yourself on Facebook

It’s been a very enlightening few months for me as I see my kids grow and reflect on myself when I was their age. In this point in my life I have been able to stop and appreciate my childhood past and have been craving the connections to my early days. I believe it wasn’t able to happen until now because I have finally found confidence in myself and where I am today as well as having kids that are trying to find their way in life.

Growing up, I had always admired my father’s ability to stay connected to early childhood buddies from elementary school on up. He was always making calls and visits to these old friends back east and it really meant a lot to him. I see why now. It is those people and experiences that we had growing up that make us who we are and why we are.

So the question is how is it possible to find our past? For me, it has been coming back in pieces of a puzzle that are growing together everyday through Facebook. I have been able to connect with relatives that I may have met once or twice for instance and see and read through their pages a bit of who they are. I have also connected with friends that I knew and were close with as a child. My first crush for instance. People I never thought I would ever be able to find again. As many women that marry change their name, it’s pretty tough to look in a phonebook or on the internet to find them. But alas, there they are on Facebook. A simple search for classmates and searching their friends as well, looking in group pages for schools you went to, pulls these friends in. It’s not only a curiosity factor as some might think to connect with old friends; what are they doing now? What do they look like? But they have revealed memories that I truly have forgotten. Memories that have made me who I am today. And I have reciprocated as well. One of my friends just the other day reminded me that we used to sing loudly in harmony in my backyard pool (and everywhere else when it was just the 2 of us). That is something I would have only done with her, as I hate singing in public, but we never judged each other. We just enjoyed music. Another friend reminded me that we knew each other since elementary school, not high school as I once thought. Wow, those are long friendships if you think about it. I hated that I put them aside, threw them away to the past as I drummed up new experiences in life. Now I find myself spending time and fighting hard to retrieve these parts of my past to hold onto from this day forward as they are a part of who I am.