An Open Letter to the Last Person Who I Barely Know on my Facebook Friend’s List Before I Remove Him
Hi, we barely know each other yet for some reason modern societal constructs could lead people to believe we might be close friends. We’re not at all! We took one semester long elective class together when I was a sophomore in high school. I was in a few of your group assignments and tried making conversation with you about music, as I desperately did with many people in high school in an attempt to make the smallest connections. I quickly learned that while my tastes were very diverse and incredibly open to discovery, you were obsessed with bands that I will never care about in the worst and most condescending way possible. In the way that you tried to force your tastes upon me (at one point you even said “You ever hear of a band called Blink 182?”) but never took the chance to hear out what I enjoyed or give them a chance. It never bothered me that you didn’t, and I soon started to distance myself from you, but it was during this period of time that you added me on facebook.
Ever since then you’ve brought me on a voyage into the world of the dumb and conceited. From writing about how you’re a huge nerd because you like Star Wars (you are, but not for that reason) to the biweekly “like this for a truth is” to the daily complaining about your job/people who you THOUGHT were your friends/why music today sucks. And in all honesty, I not only found it enthralling, but it just gave me self-confidence knowing that no matter how bad things got, I wasn’t overexposing my life publically on the internet and constantly painting the world as the bad guy. For example, I remember feeling shitty one time when I was with a group of friends who were all in relationships and I wasn’t. I felt a little disheartened hearing about how happy they all were to have someone to lean on, and how I never had someone like that in my own life. However, after I saw that you had posted hundreds of pictures with your new girlfriend at a free Smash Mouth concert, I felt comfortable with being single for the first time in a very long time.
But I need to stop using you as a wall to lean on. I just started putting in some of my first applications for potential jobs and internships in environments I could only dream of working. By the time this letter gets published I will definitively know whether one of the more competitive jobs I applied to decided to go with me. I’m sure my chances of getting in are slim to none and will naturally start to doubt my abilities and around this time I will have the urge to see you asking over 1000 people on the internet if you should get a tattoo of a tribal snake across your back or a tiger to make myself feel better. But instead I will have to face reality and move on and deal with it. And I will probably face even more doors being slammed in my face after that. I appreciate what you’ve done for me in the past, but I have to treat my failures as an opportunity to figure out how to better myself as a person experience without diluting them by thinking “oh wow, at least I’ve never felt the need to make sure everyone I know is aware of when I am going to the gym.”
I’m looking at your page one last time before I remove you and see that you have over 1,400 friends. You realize that you are connected to more people than occupants in some small towns or villages, right? Do you ever consider how many people can view what you write and if their relationship with you warrants knowing that information? I realize that I could probably never bring myself to allow that many people to have access to all that information about my life. However, if I ever did I would be so much more interested with what I could do with the access to information about those people. I’d probably spend more time reading about other people’s lives and would realize that I quite honestly don’t have that much to talk about in my own life. But I guess letting people know that you don’t like Justin Bieber and that REAL MUSIC is dead is a better use of time. By the way, you ever noticed that he looks like a girl?
Sincerely,
Eric
