I remember the day my friend came rushing into my dorm room blabbing about something called The Facebook. She had heard about it from a friend at another school (Illinois Urbana-Champaign, I think?) and it was all the rage. You had to know someone who was already on the site to get an invite, because back in the fall of 2004 it was still that exclusive. My friend got invited and she wanted to join but not before she had guaranteed a friend to join with her.
I declined the invitation.
It took about a month of badgering between the time she first brought it up and the day I joined: November 11, 2004. I'll never forget because I had to be pulled away from completing my profile to call my dad for his birthday.
The Facebook in its early days was sparse, to say the least. The exclusivity of the invite-only system coupled with the fact that you had to have a matching .edu address to identify your college and the super short list of schools included in the beginning made it a novelty. Oh you're on The Facebook? Can I get an invite?! I don't know why we were all in a fluster to join because it had such limited functionality: a single profile picture, a couple of blank spots to enter favorite quotations and a blurb about yourself, and the "wall" which at that point was nothing more than a text box that was open to everyone to add, edit, or erase. At first we patiently waited for more schools to be added so that our friends on other campuses could join in our online stalking frenzy; after a while the patience turned into furied requests to the developers to add U of [insert school here] or [blank] State. At U Iowa, we happily taunted Iowa State for being overlooked in the nation-wide race to be acknowledged by the mysterious Mark Zuckerburg (I can still hear it, Who's Mark Zuckerberg? Is he like Tom or something? as we all waited for Mark Zuckerberg to request to be our friend. Still waiting, by the way).
I have been around for every new incarnation of Facebook, from the dropping of "The", to the inclusion of all universities and colleges, to the confusingly separated inclusion of high schools, to the merger, to the addition of business and celebrity pages, the news feed, the live updates, and most recently, timeline and graph search.
Aside from the URL and the color scheme, little has stayed the same.
As much as I hate what this monster has turned into, how it's eaten the world and consumed (devoured?) our social lives and changed the way we Internet forever, the truth remains: I have never lived a moment of my adult life sans Facebook.
Theories of how Facebook impacts our self-esteem have been flying rampant for years, studies have been conducted, books have been written, and movements have started to boycott the site. Coming up on nine years of uninterrupted Facebook activity, I can say I understand it all. What I've found most interesting about what people have to say about the site isn't in the details, it's in the weight it carries in almost every aspect of socialization. Because on Facebook, everything is real regardless of the actual truth.
So they say social media is a person's highlight reel, not the whole story of their lives. But do we ever get the whole story? Do we? If we could imagine a world entirely devoid of any social media, is there a complete story to tell? My answer is a definitive no. Social media is simply a digitized versions of the stories we might tell around the water cooler, only enriched with photos and videos and user-generated text that give a less flattened account of what really happened last Friday night. As far as self-esteem goes, that has more to do with the users than it does with the site.
Back in 2004, The Facebook was barebones. It was a rare opportunity to publicly (and yet somehow privately) broadcast key details about one's self en masse. You were given two blank boxes in which to share things about yourself, begging the question "what do you want your neighbors to know about you?" because in those days you were sharing your online self with your literal neighbors: the girls on your dorm floor that you were too intimidated to talk to in person; the guy a few floors down you were too shy to talk to... but because November 2004 Facebook was just a few hundred people at your school, you knew that if you wrote "I like to watch horror movies" he would inevitably find out that you liked to watch horror movies. [Serious interjection: that is the true story of two friends who met over Facebook and subsequently married and subsequently divorced, but that last part is neither here nor there.] Without realizing it, our 18 and 19-year-old selves were faced with a serious question that would come to define the next decade of our lives: who is the Internet you?
Outwardly, we wanted to show the best of ourselves. The (literal and figurative) girl next door who quoted Audrey Hepburn and Coco Chanel, my freshman dorm neighbor whom I am still friends with to this day. Or, in my case, raunchy quotes from Happy Bunny merchandise and things repeated from keg parties because I was trying oh-so-hard to be a party girl. The first year of having The Facebook was the most exhilarating because we had to literally spell out who or what we wanted to be perceived as because our online personas were nothing more than a photo, some quotations, and a character-limited paragraph of our own writing. Nowadays the thousands of photos (both edited and unflattering), the pages we like, the companies we follow, the religious and political affiliations we identify, and the things posted on our behalf tell your story without you ever having to type a word.
In the early days it was understood among users that you don't act like a dick on The Facebook, not that we got much use out of our limited profiles anyway. When we gained the photo function there was a girl-group pact among my friends agreeing to not post unflattering pictures or pictures where we could be seen holding or drinking alcohol. Later with the tagging ability we agreed not to tag anyone without their permission (because Facebook hadn't quite gotten to the stage where you could un-tag yourself). Even in the beginning there was the heightened realization that someone, a nameless faceless important someone, was watching and our behavior online would be scrutinized as much as it would be offline. I firmly believe that my joining The Facebook at its inception has completely formed the way I approach my sense of self both on and off the website.
They say Facebook is your highlight reel, and so for me it was. It was a godsend when we could update our statuses through text messages lest we forget that super funny thing so-and-so said drunkenly at 3am. Facebook had become the living, breathing, constantly updated journal that chronicled our lives allowing us to piece together the happenings of last night's party, or more appropriately once we grew up, it allowed us to keep in touch across town or across the globe. Instant photos from summer abroad, or regular status updates about that internship in the city; whatever it was, if we took the time to click "share" it would be there forever. It certainly wasn't an immediate realization, but Facebook for me and my friends became the external hard drive to our brains to fill in where our memories would fail us. Even in our 20s were were already forgetting the details of freshman, sophomore, junior, senior years in college, but our trusty friend Facebook was there to capture the highlight reel of the things we wished to remember forever. So many times we quipped "We should have a reality show" because everything we did was so important that it needed to be shared, but little did we know we were already broadcasting live.
It certainly hasn't been all good and fun, there are things in my Facebook archive I would rather not remember, there are even things (and people) I have taken the trouble to delete from digital history and from my life. With the benefit of hindsight I wish I had been a little less callous, that I had exercised more tact, that I could have been sage enough to recognize my bad decisions before they were recorded online. With that being said, I could never say "I wish I had done less." My Facebook profile (the original, never deleted, never merged, never suspended) stands as a testament to the life I have lived and I would take back none of it. It's the scrapbook we all wish we had in old age and thankfully (hopefully?) many of us will. It's the stories of our lives for which we were the photographers, the writers, the editors, and the publishers, Facebook acting as the distributors and the audience is none of our choosing. What is interesting about our highlight reel isn't what we choose to share, but how that changes over time. It can be simplified to say that we choose the best of ourselves in our own portrayal, whether it breeds narcissism is up for debate, and it is endlessly fascinating to have an actual record of the way time changes us.
I had an idea a few years back, let's call it 2008 after a nasty ending to a years-long friendship, that my Facebook wasn't my online Dear Diary to share personal-yet-irrelevant details publicly; rather, my profile would become an actual digital scrapbook. Photographs, notes sharing "I love you"s and "I miss you"s, and years of reciprocated birthday wishes that otherwise might not be sent if left relegated to Hallmark and the US Postal Service. From time to time I might update my status to share a funny story or mark an important milestone, but ultimately all the content would be for my future use that I was graciously allowing my 200+ friends to share for the time being.
I was writing a long, rich, multimedia letter to my future self in case I ever forgot the beautiful life I lived.
I honestly did think (assuming Facebook still exits decades from now) that I would look back on my account in my old age and my heart would skip a beat getting to indulge in all my youthful indiscretions. I believed that I was intimately familiar with my own story and I wouldn't need this reminder for many, many years to come. Oh, how quickly I forgot. In a recent moment of weakness or vanity or whatever you choose to call it, I began flipping through my own photos, my heart skipping a beat indulging my youthful indiscretions. Things that happened not long ago: last month, last fall, a year ago, two years ago. I had barely reached double digit photos when my heart stopped completely, only for a second but long enough to rip the air from my lungs and the color from my face.
Photos dating back only a year and already I could see things I didn't like, photos dating back two years and I hardly recognized my own face staring back at me.
I like to believe that I've been rather forthcoming about my [potential] body dysmorphic disorder: 80-something pounds lost and I often feel the same, I think that I look the same, and if affects my mood but mostly these feelings sway like a pendulum with less predictability. My feelings have intensified as my ability to engage in my favorite exercises has been impeded by my foot injury and these days it's undeniable that I've crossed the line from brooding to depressed. I have no idea what took hold of me that caused me to take that trip down memory lane but I'm happy I did. More staggeringly: I'm happy.
It's taken a great deal of reflection but I've finally come to the realization that my problem with my own perception has been backwards all along: it's not that I can't picture 210-pound-me, it's that I couldn't picture 290-pound-me; I don't feel different now because I never saw myself as different then. Call it a miracle or denial or whatever have you, but I was never able to fully comprehend how bad it had gotten even at its worst. I was functionally fat but "just a little overweight." My thoughts were constantly peppered with "That's normal" or "Everyone looks this way" or "It's not that bad." I built walls and walls of protection around my psyche to trick myself into believing that my behavior was, at worst, benign neglect. It was in those Facebook photos that the truth finally found me.
I saw a girl whose calves were thicker than healthy waists, a girl who was constantly uncomfortable in clothes that cinched and shoes that cut, a girl who couldn't wrap her arms around her boyfriend because both his and her guts were too big to complete the circumference. That girl couldn't walk half a mile, that girl couldn't sit comfortably, that girl couldn't catch her breath, and worst, that girl couldn't see herself.
Whatever force kept me from seeing that in that moment, I say thanks. Whatever force made me sick and forced me to see a doctor, I say thanks. Whatever force lit the fire in my gut that got me to change my ways, I say thanks. And most painfully yet most importantly, I say thanks to my younger self and to Facebook, the former for having the foresight to be kind to my online person, and the latter for providing a place where I can store the memories I hope to never forget.
All it took was two years, two years to come this far and two years to forget where I started.
Part of the curse of Facebook is believing that you can delete something out of existence, and maybe sometimes it's therapeutic or cathartic to click "delete" and feel the release of emotions even knowing once online always online. I have debated whether I should alter my own highlight reel to gloss over the less-than-happy times of my life, to skip the part where I gained and then lost 80 pounds, not because I'm ashamed but because the ghost of that makes me sad. I've proven already how quickly my memory has failed me and it would be easy to bury that part of myself, at least as it is incarnated online, but for now I'm going to let it stay at least as a reminder of who I hope to never be again.
