Therapy required - all thanks to Facebook

So I'm a Facebook addict. I'll openly admit that I check my Facebook many times a day in hopes that someone has sent me a message or posted something fun for me to look at from their life. I'm sure it's a sign of my disconnect from the real world, being here at home with my two kids. So far, I've only connected with my current circle of friends - people who have been part of my life in the last 10 years. It's fun to feel like they are more part of my day-to-day world, when most of them live so far away.

One exception to my list of Facebook friends is a friend that I went to junior high and high school with that I fell out of touch with and am happy to be reconnected. The problem is she sent me a link to a "group" for people who went to our junior high. So now part of my regular Facebook routine is to look at who has joined that group, mostly out of curiosity. It's natural to want to see what the people who haunted my early teens look like now and see who they are still friends with. And that's exactly what I did the other night. I started clicking on people and digging down to see who is still friends with who and who has joined Facebook. It shouldn't have come as much surprise that I started to find ex-boyfriends (ok, this one's from high school, I was never cool enough to have a boyfriend in junior high) and ex-friends. What did surprise me was the sudden wave of anxiety that washed over me as I looked at these people. Memories came flooding back. Memories of the horrible mind games that teenage girls play on one another in junior high. It was difficult for me to look at some people and despite knowing full well that they are adults now and probably very nice people, I felt angry towards them. I felt angry at the sudden dip in my self-esteem, just from looking at their picture.

So I'm going to stop searching for people that I used to know. I know that I would never instigate a connection with them. The shy part of me thinks "would they even remember me". The grown-up, get a hold of yourself part of me thinks "who really cares". What really scares me is what lies ahead for my children, especially my daughter. Although we're still almost a decade away from junior high, I worry about her and I worry about me, how I'll react to her junior high experience. Best to remain focused in the present - the demands of being four and two - instead of reliving the past and worrying about the future.