Facebook Panic

We've all felt it - unless I'm some kind of aberration and the rest of you are perfect people with perfect lives - the panic you feel when a friend from say.....well,....30 years ago, suddenly makes a friend request on Facebook. And in your excitement at hearing from the cute guy who sat behind you in your American History class in 11th grade, you forget momentarily that your WHOLE LIFE is spread out online for any who should look around even slightly, to see. There are moritfyingly bad photos of you; things you wrote when you were, well, NOT in the best frame of mind and which you really really weren't thinking of being viewed by your high school friends and...not-friends (to be polite) when you posted them. And now terror grips you as you feel your pride crumble and the pile of arrogance on which you'd been standing, suddenly give way into a massive landslide.

Frantic possibilities for solution come to mind; "Scour your blogs and every document with which the internet is littered and try to remove these incriminating items?" "Quit Facebook NOW before it's too late?" "Try to infect Google and Facebook with some kind of horrible virus?" (jk Google and FB, ...and internet police...) Throw your laptop from a cliff and never, ever go online again and then just PRAY you don't run into anyone whose SEEN that pic of you in your underwear and having had one too many? (And no; this is hypothetical folks, don't go looking for such a pic of me online! lol)

And what about the fact that you discover that best friends, which whom you were neck and neck for the top grades in school; are now the leading doctors in places like Harvard and Yale and you are....ummm, disabled and unemployed with nothing better to do that to embarrass myself online? (OK, granted this one is ME, but you've all doubtless felt something similar--unless you are a leading specialist at Yale or Harvard yourself and have probably done nothing shameful -publicly anyway).

In the end (for me, anyway, although yes, there are a few articles which I am strongly considering removing from my blog) in the end, we must eventually come to the place where we can relinquish the pride and say, "What's done is done" and relinquish every drop of self-flattery and pretense in us and just let it be. LET them think what they want ... The truth is you did the best you could with the events, disabilities, disasters and challenges that came your way. And it is NOT what your high school crowd thinks of me that counts anyway. It's what my Father i n Heaven thinks that matters in the long run. And--I'm fairly certain--He approves.