Tuesday, August 25, 2015

The Unfriend

"Unfriend." 

I simply want to share how this strangest of all verbs has affected my life and my desire to change that.

The only thing that will cause me to "unfriend" a person on the book of faces is if someone is offending me in an extreme manner with a personal attack, cruelty, or mega stalkage.  You see, in my world, someone has to have gone so far past the tolerable zone, that I will go out of my way to hunt down the "unfriend" button and consciously make the effort to click it with a sigh of good riddance.  Most often, the unfriend is not worth my time.  I've "unfollowed" here and there when someone loves to talk about a topic not of interest to me too often, but it takes a lot to get me to truly feel someone is not worth being in my life any longer and actively make the cut. 

This, my friends, is why I hurt more than I should when I haphazardly discover someone I have loved at some point in my life (friends, old roommates,cast mates, ultimate frisbee buddies, the list goes on) has gone out of their way to unfriend me.  This usually happens when I go to send a message or type on their wall that something made me think of them.  I know there are many, many reasons someone could have chosen to unfriend, but because I know why I do, it hurts.  I think, "How sad is it that I'd still be thinking of them and they have cut me from association?"  I find myself going through stages of denial.  Then I spend way more time than I should looking over my own Facebook page trying to figure out what the heck I did that was so offensive to them that they wanted to cut me out of their lives.  If I knew, I would absolutely apologize, but I come up blank every time.  (All ex's have a get out of jail free card in the unfriend...I understand those).

Maybe a picture of myself in my latest theater production that a friend tagged is too much?  Maybe my bi-monthly status updates are too much?  Maybe they can't handle my awesomeness?  *sigh*  I really don't know.  I have tried over and over to not let it bug me, but it does because I love so deeply and so permanently.  Every person I have associated with has left an imprint in my life - helping me become the person I am today.

I'll never know.  It will probably always bug me.  But that's okay.  Life is great and I can consider myself blessed to have had a friend in the first place and then even more blessed for the ones who keep me around. 

3 comments:

j said...

I think that some people just have different ideas of what a Facebook "friend" should be. For whatever reasons (I'm not one of them so I can only speculate), they prefer to keep a smaller list of friends, limited in part by those people they see and/or interact with IRL (in real life) regularly. So maybe you can spare your feelings a bit by not assuming their unfriending is the same as yours would be. Maybe add them again and see what happens. :)

Teeners said...

Sometimes I get sad about people unfriendliness me on fb too. But I think sometimes the fb just kicks you out. I have a cousin whose wife suddenly didn't show up as a friend anymore, and we couldn't figure it out. I know she didn't do it on purpose. Weird.

Larissa said...

Of course I've thought of these explanations many times before. I just wanted to get off my chest why it bothers me, not that my explanations are the only way. Thank you oodles for trying to make my thoughts cheerier!