I just made a decision of no great import. But it took me a long time to make it, it woke up a lot of memories, and I have no better way to process it than to write it out, especially considering how much my brain be broke lately.

so, about, oh, two, three weeks ago, a person who went to my high school when I was there sent a friend request on Ye Olde Booke of Ye Faces. What the hell , I went, and clicked okay. 

Thus beginneth the problem. 

 See, this was a person who had never made a secret of her disdain for me, back in the day. Sure, we’re all a lot older, and hopefully a bit better people, but, still, I have trouble acknowledging one of the few people who DID like me in high school on The Egyptian Book of the Face because I don’t know what to say to him after a good thirty years of radio silence. 

Why would someone who, given the choice between spending time with me and with a slime mole colony, would pick the colony nine times out of ten, want to reconnect? Hell, to connect at all?

If there are readers of this, then you may or may not have seen that comic that went viral this week about the person who found her high school abuser on-line, and was dismayed to see that that person was well-thought of and had a reasonable life. That’s kind of this situation, except that this person wasn’t an active bully, just someone who made the disgust at the thought of me very plain.

It doesn’t help, of course, that this person apparently has done very well indeed in the intervening years, and is now a quite respected scholar at a major university in the UK. I’ve got low-enough self-esteem as it is, and, as petty as I may be, but it kind of twisted the knife with my totally-unlikely-to-get-tenure-and-holding-on-to-sanity-with-the-most-feeble-of-grips situation to see someone who apparently was not only tenured but had been fought over by multiple institutions. 

The decision I spoke of above, by the way, was to unfriend the person. The memories awoken were not helpful, the shame and the perception of myself as a failure weren’t helpful either, and the fact that I’m sliding into a total breakdown was, really, on the unhelpful side, to boot.

I dunno. Maybe I should have used this as a face-ones-anxiety moment.  Maybe I’m worse than I think I am.

I can’t help but wonder, though... why send the request in the first place?