I've been taking a haitus from Facebook for about 9 months now, and it's been wonderful. I'm less often upset, struggle less frequently with feeling forgotten and left out, and it's helped me refocus on the people that are willing to reach out in the real world.
I got on tonight and man, it's not as horrible as I've been saying. I do struggle with feeling like there's something wrong with me that I'm not wrapped up in the lives of people from high school. Doing a little stalking, for some reason it hurts to see people I was close to being close with each other but not with me. I'm not sure what it is about me that makes me see it that way, but there it is. Facebook bound. Bound by regrets and lack of comprehension at why my life has moved away from those people and their lives haven't moved away from each other.
It is what it is.
I was able to catch up with family members, which is one of the brighter ways Facebook binds us together. My cousin posted, probably a long while ago, a video of a girl playing a song about depression on her guitar and commented that she personally mourns for the girl she was before she developed depression, or whatever the right word for that would be.
I don't know how to articulate my response to that. I'm kind of baffled and struck by the foreigness of that thought. I remember my childhood as a largely lonely time with some great room to roam in and my siblings as my only steady social contact with peers. I've got large gaps of not remembering--years--and it was mostly the outdoors that fed my happier memories from that time. I've never related to other people talking like their childhoods were this great time of lack of difficulties and worry, and I honestly don't remember very well what it was like "before" depression entered my life. I'm kind of grateful for that because I don't have this memory of myself as more engaged in and capable of living life without emotional struggles. When I cast my eyes backwards over the past I see progress and I see how my situation grew better as I aged, even amidst depression and heartbreak and growing up. I'm not left mouring for how I used to be, at least not from childhood and adolescence. Maybe for who I was as a missionary, but the missionary I was still had depression so lack of that struggle is not what I miss from her.
I'm a little all over the place tonight. I'm trying to talk more, to get things out.
