Cognitive Facebook Therapy

I'm a Facebook and Twitter junkie. It allows me to stay connected with friends and family in a way that e-mail simply doesn't (and it gives me a place to escape when the workday is tap dancing on my nerves). But--as many people have discovered--Facebook allows people from your past to find you. Someone found me on Facebook yesterday, and it got me to thinking about the people and events that shaped my adulthood. Both good and not-so-good.

My years in middle and high school were like everyone's, I guess--we all felt like freaks at one point or another. I wasn't the only tall, skinny, gawky, thick-lensed, black nerdgirl in the world, but I was the only one in my large middle and high schools. So, of course, I got teased: I was trying to be white because of the way I talked and because I was in drama and choir. I was called ugly because I dressed like a weird black militant goth hybrid. I was mocked by the kids in my neighborhood for carrying books home. Nothing new--I was a weirdo of color from a very early age and learned to wear my weirdness with a certain amount of pride. My parents are responsible for building that pride, and I adore them for it.

But there was a clique of girls who did their best to make me feel pretty horrible about myself. My goofy attempts to be a part of a group--cheerleading for an inner-city kids' football league (yes, child, I was a cheerleader)--made things even worse. One girl in my squad--also a part of that Mean Girls clique--was merciless. She was tall, like me, but where I was bony and angular, she was already soft and curvy. She was loud and sure in the way that teenaged girls can be, aggressive in her judgments and confident enough to convince the other girls in her group that everything she said was the honest for-real truth. Every time she saw me, she made fun of me. My clothes, the way I talked, and later, when I rocked a blonde minifro, my hair. By the time I got to high school, I did my best to ignore her; she did not, however, ignore me.

When I left high school, I pretty much forgave and forgot. Kids can be cruel, but that cruelty doesn't usually come from a truly evil place, if that makes any sense--kids are mean to each other because it's how they learn to be adults, how they push themselves into independence. But when the girl who made it her hobby to taunt me sent me a friend request on Facebook, all that cruelty came back in a flash.

Especially when I saw her picture.

My grandmother, a fiercely wise woman, used to say, "People's inside ugly comes to the surface as they get older." I didn't recognize the girl--now a woman--at first. The dark circles under her eyes looked burned in. Her skin, once a smooth dark chocolate that I envied, looked grayed and tired. Her expression, more sneer than smile, was what reminded me of who she was. She looked like the same Mean Girl who laughed at my chicken legs and ant-burner glasses, only older and meaner. And she'd requested to be my friend on Facebook.

I am well aware of how lame this sounds: "OMG, this chick who used to laugh at me 15 years ago wants to be Facebook friends! How dare she!" But I thought about how Facebook allows us to contact people from our past. Ten years ago--hell, two years ago--I was content to see schoolmates every now and then and promptly forget about them. Now, people I don't even recognize e-mail me to reminisce about Biology class or the parties we attended together. Leaving my adolescence behind is harder to do now--because some folks don't want to let go. Some kids shed that cruelty like an old skin; others hold on to it and let it become part of their core. Some people take whatever made them their best in childhood and hold on to it, for better or worse. I don't know if that's sad or not. Maybe it's just how we're made.

I can't--and won't--say that the woman with the Droopy Dog eyes is the same girl she was when we were in our early teens. Chances are she doesn't remember tormenting me, just as I'm sure I did things to classmates that have long since sunk into rarely used memory cells. But seeing her face reminded me of how much of my gawky, weirdo teen self is still left in me, how much of it I still need to set down and leave behind. And a part of that is the pain that one girl caused me.

Maybe the small pleasure I took in seeing that picture is my own inside ugly. And I need to set that down, too.

I'm working on it.