According to Wikipedia, the original purpose of Facebook was to allow college students to get together and talk about their majors online. After a couple of years, Facebook was bought out and offered to the public. Since it has been opened up to anyone 13 years old and up who have an email address, Facebook has changed over and over again and I feel it has lost its initial purpose: to bring people together to connect.
When I joined Facebook, I thought it would be a great way to stay in contact with my family and friends who go to other schools, as well as friends who go to school with me. I am a shy person and opening up is a hard thing for me to do. So I also joined Facebook to help others get to know me, because I am more comfortable writing about myself than I am talking about myself.
Because I am a shy person I don't always do things that I should, which is one of my weaknesses that I am doing my best to overcome. I am also a very caring and loving person. When any of my friends or family are hurt or need me to stand up for them, I do my best to comfort and support them, but hardly ever do I stand up to someone for my friend. I absolutely dread confrontation and it scares me to the marrow of my bones. So if I ever stood up for someone, usually someone else instead of myself, it's because I'm extremely angry and have to release that anger.
I have been working on overcoming my shyness over the past 6 years and I have many people to thank for helping me throughout the years, but standing up for myself still terrifies me and that is because I am a caring person and don't want to hurt anyone. I hate hurting anyone, intentionally or accidentally. I have been hurt many, many times myself and I don't want anyone else to go through what I have been through.
When I got married, I never thought that in the first three years that I would live in three different cities/towns. I knew that my husband's job would move him around as he climbed the ladder, but I thought that climbing up the ladder would take longer and would be a slow ascent. However, the Lord had a different plan for us and I found myself packing up my apartment six months into my marriage and moving to another state. This move to a place I had never been before and knew no one at all. I quickly learned that I definitely needed to break out of my shell and get out of my comfort zone of keeping to myself. I needed to know people and make friends or I was going to crack and have a clinical mental break down.
And so I learned to be more comfortable with approaching people and asking questions to get to know them and to build friendships. I did have some help along the way from other people introducing themselves, introducing other people to me, or my husband introducing people to me, mostly people from work. After time I found it easier and easier for me to make friends and to open up to people. I also found I was talking about myself more without giving a thought.
There was a time last year when all that I saw on Facebook made me question my friends and their morals, standards, and even their intelligence. Some of my friends were posting things that were false, misspelled, grammatically incorrect, as well as gross, unnecessary, damaging, and down-right stupid. A lot of my friends got caught up with what is considered okay today to post online: food, cuts, broken bones, hashtags, etc. And these posts made me rethink the friends that I had made. I thought that I had intelligent friends.
After a few posts from different people posting pictures of their cuts with blood, I kindly asked that my friends stop posting those kinds of pictures because I as well as many other people are squeamish and can't handle the sight of blood. I didn't target anyone in particular. I didn't call out any of my friends in the status. I simply made a request that I felt was reasonable. And one of my friends, or I thought she was my friend, laughed at me and I flipped a switch and started to stand up for myself. Luckily, I had the tact to move our discussion to private messages before it got out of hand and that is when I realized that I needed to re-evaluate my friends and cut out those I felt didn't appreciate my friendship.
I have almost always been loyal to my friends and I expected the same loyalty in return, because friendship is important to me and I do not take it for granted. So I did a huge purge of my friends and only kept family members, close friends, role models, and those who expressed they would like to keep in contact with me. I went from almost 300 friends down to 123, 52% of those being family members. I have since then added a few friends, but I haven't added just anyone. Only those whom I know without a doubt are truly my friend are those who get to see into my personal life and keep up with me and what I'm doing. In other words, I kept my actual friends.
Friends Fight for you, Respect you, Include you, Encourage you, Need you, Deserve you, and Stand by you. I will not take friendship lightly nor for granted and all I ask from my friends is the same thing. Don't take me for granted because I truly love and care about you.
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