I had that strange experience this week of being ‘unfriended’ on Facebook.
I was surprised at how much it hurt… at first. She & I lived different lives in different cities for a long time. We lost contact but heard about each other through mutual friends, and more recently reconnected at our children’s school.
A few weeks ago, I noticed that she’d posted a status update saying that she intended to tidy up her FB account and only keep ‘actual friends’ – fair enough. But when I noticed that I wasn’t receiving her updates anymore, I realised I didn’t fit into the category of ‘actual friend’.
How could she live without experiencing my sparkling, sometimes acerbic wit on a regular basis? In my mind, I played out seeing her in the playground and casually remarking that I hadn’t seen her holiday snaps on FB, and get her to admit that she’d dumped me, to which I would reply something witty like; “well there is such a thing as having too many friends!”, or more heartrending: “after all we’ve been through together – (albeit years ago) We rode our bikes to the beach that time. You came to my baby shower!”
Luckily, I shook myself out of it and when I did bump into her in the playground with her friends, I just smiled and said “hey.” I prefer to think like Bill Johnson who says: “be unoffendable.” This was a swift reminder about those things we let tumble around in our minds. How much healthier it is to have a clean out before wrong thinking gets more of a foothold. Put the rubbish out for collection, dust yourself off and do something useful with your time. How about inviting someone out for a coffee and making a new ‘actual friend’?