This must be a blast from the past week

[mrsbrown]

Last week sjkasabi and I decided we needed to get onto Facebook so we could find an old friend. BTW, I avoided that by using MsNotaGoth's account and the results were inconclusive. I found her (the old friend that is, not MsNotaGoth) through Google, but not enough to know what she' s doing now, only what she was doing in 2001. I was amused to realise that I knew I had found her when I found a photo and had only seen her hands and wrists. She has incredibly skinny hands, wrists and feet. I think she might be in Canberra, but home with children, 'cos one of the references I found was a submission to the ACT Government on children's health.

Anyway.

Today I recieved an email from another school friend. Someone I haven't seen since I invited all my school mates to MrPeacock's first birthday party. She didn't give me much info in her email, but Google rescued me again and I think she has been operating in friendship groups with people I know from the SCA. I know that's not surprising, it's more surprising that I haven't run into her before now.

I feel really uncomfortable with this. What am I supposed to do now?. It's exciting and all, but there's a reason I didn't keep up a friendship with this person. I don't know what it is, and it might just be the whole becoming a mother at 20 thing, so that actually, her 3 year old daughter and my 3 year old daughter would get on like houses on fire and we could talk about music and she could come to singing at my place and it would be fabulous.

Or else I could spend time agonising about what to write her and then she'd spend time writing to me when actually we've got nothing but our school history in common and it would be just hard work.

Sometimes I hate being shy.

or thinking too much

I had a lovely time reading about her life though.

Comments

parallel that might help

[sleepy-ermine.livejournal.com]

I have an old friend I hadn't seen for years and I tracked her down on Facebook, then I had lots of angst about whether to rekindle the friendship. Instead of "hey it's great i've found you, lets get together", I sent a friend request with a more non-committal "hi, long time no see, how are things with you?" She accepted the friend request & we each sent friendly but tentative messages and now we comment on the occasional post or picture, but there's no pressure to pick up and try being friends again.
I actually really like that about FB - it gives you a halfway option - to gently stay in touch without the pressure to work out whether you fit back in each other's lives. Hope this helps...

[hnpcc]

What am I supposed to do now?

Meet somewhere neutral for a coffee or other beverage? Preferably somewhere with a playground for the 3 year olds?

That way, you've spent an hour max if it all goes pear shaped. Or you could come away feeling fantastic that you reopened a connection that may well just have gotten dropped because you were at different stages when you were in your early 20s.

[hnpcc]

Oh and can I just say I'm impressed you found someone with facebook? Because seriously the one thing that Facebook's shown me is that I can't remember anyone's surnames, particularly if they got married and changed it, and the few people whose full names I can actually remember share their name with approximately 300 other people, none of whom want to put up photos. Even the people who I thought had reasonably uncommon names turn out to share them with large numbers of people around the world. Who'da thunk.

Not that I can talk - I do have a photo up, but given I'm wearing make up in it I'm not actually all that recognisable. And I have an extremely common name (more than 600 on Facebook last time I looked...) I don't show up on Google for the same reason, heh. :-)

[mishymoocow-2.livejournal.com]

Comes a point when its best to treat old acquaintances like new friends if you're going to reconnect even minimally.

I'm not sure we really can tell all that much about a person by basing it on what they were like at 16. Unless they were mean all the time, rather than being mean out of insecurity which seems to be what most teens do?

Good luck with it all.