In a previous post, I described how I am going back and reading through all of my old journals. There are 38 completely filled up. I’m writing in #39 right now. Yesterday I read volume 7. At that point in my life, when I was filling up #7, I was finishing my sophomore year of high school. I was deep in the throws of teen angst. All 7 of my journals so far have been pretty much nothing but teen angst…drama with friends, crushes, flirting with boys, losing my virginity (huge mistake at that age by the way), and reading about all of that is a very surreal experience. I previously reflected about how it’s like having a one-sided conversation with my younger self. It still is, but what struck me yesterday about reading all of this is what I know about these people now. These journals were written in the 90s. The internet was just starting to become a thing and certainly there was no social media as we know it. And yet, here I am in 2024 and I’m friends with many of these people that I went to high school with on Facebook. I know how their lives turned out, which makes it incredibly weird to read about what they were like when we were teenagers. It got me thinking about our perceptions of each other now on social media. For example, one of my best friends from middle school is a friend on Facebook. She and I have interactions on there pretty regularly. I see the pictures she posts of her husband and kids and I don’t really think much of it. That’s just what people post on Facebook. But now that I’m going back through my journals and I’m reading about how our friendship ended early on when we started high school, it’s very strange looking at her posts on Facebook now.
I’m looking at other people I was deeply involved with back then and now I’m wondering, when they look at my posts on Facebook, what is their perception of me now? I’m reading back and seeing what kind of person I was back then and it’s a very big difference from who I am now. I think that’s true for many of us (except the punk I lost my virginity to. Apparently he grew up to be someone who got arrested for a DUI and now likes to argue about politics on there. Absolutely not surprising). Is this something that I am alone in thinking? Surely I’m not the only one who looks at people I used to know and reflect on past experiences with them and really contemplate the growth they have (or haven’t) done. How much of our past, high school selves, are still with us today? We are all supposedly grown up and more mature. But is there any part of us left that still resembles the people we were in high school? For me, I don’t think there is. From reading my innermost thoughts and feelings from that time period, I don’t see my current self in any of that writing. I think that’s a good thing though. After all, we learn from our past and our experiences help shape us into the people we eventually become.
I still maintain that this is a very weird experience…refreshing my memory about high school via what I wrote more than 25 years ago versus what I see of these people on social media now. We have such a rare opportunity now to use social media to not just compare these people to how they were, but sometimes to make things right. Years ago I apologized to someone on Facebook for how I treated him in high school. I was just plain mean to him. On the flip side, I accepted a friend request from a girl that bullied me mercilessly in middle and high school. I don’t know why I did, I generally avoid being “friends” with the long list of people who bullied me in high school. But then one Christmas, she posted about how her husband randomly walked out on her and their two daughters and took all of the money so that there was no way she could afford to give her girls any kind of Christmas. I saw her posts and without provocation, I sent her money to get presents for her girls. In return, she sent me picture after picture of what she was able to buy for them and how happy they were on Christmas. It also led to her confessing how horrible she felt about the way she treated me back then and how amazing it was that I did that for her despite our past history.
I really feel that a whole book could be written about this. It’s almost funny to think about but I am sure there are thousands of stories about bridging the past and the present with social media. There could be a deep analysis of the psychology behind who we are now and our perceptions of each other based on what we know of the past and what we see posted online.
Just some random thoughts I’ve had lately as I’ve been reading my journals. I’ve restricted myself to only reading one a day so I don’t overwhelm myself and allow my brain to comprehend and process and recover/settle from the emotions that are conjured up by reading about the past. Sometimes I go several days in between volumes, but I’m currently at a point where I want to hurry up and read more because after 7 volumes of me talking about the same two boys and the same issues with friends and the high school experience, I’m ready to get to other parts of my life beyond all of that. Because the blessing in all of this is that while I get bogged down mentally with reading about and remembering all of this high school drama, I do eventually graduate high school and move on. Thank God for that!
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