The Worst Part is Seeing the People You've Left Behind

I'm occasionally still on Facebook, mostly to keep up on a few writing community-related things, and in amongst that and the AI slop, Facebook occasionally decides to show me things by old friends.

And in some ways, I wish it wouldn't, because it's devastatingly painful the way some of us have changed and grown apart. I'm thinking in particular of one friend: naturally brilliant, soaring through high school without any obstacles, he crashed and burned in university. Fell behind in classes, failed classes, retook classes, failed them again.

His Facebook feed is maybe five or six posts a year, most of which are out-of-context posts about right-wing talking points. And I've wondered where his heart's gone. He used to be the sort who'd do anything for a friend, and it's been awful seeing him fall to the ring-wing echo chamber of Rebel News et al. When I was younger, I remember having a conversation with someone decades older than me. She told me I was idealistic now, but as I got older, I'd naturally get more conservative.

I'm here to say I didn't; that though there have been parts of my life that maybe haven't gone as planned, at least my heart's unscathed. Even as the world's going to shit, I'm always thinking about people who have it worse. I vote accordingly. I could never vote for political parties who, very explicitly, want to make certain people's lives worse. Trans people, those with mental health issues, and more. You know which parties I'm taking about. In Canada, there are two.

I'm a little less active on social media than I've been in previous years - probably a good thing - and one of the things I like about Mastodon and Bluesky is that I have very few mutuals who knew me before I started living my adult life. I sometimes think about how, after moving away from my hometown in my early 20s, my mental image of a lot of people I used to know is sort of necessarily based on how I used to know them. And how in the two decades since, there's obviously been a lot of change. Some of it physical (I mean, speaking personally, I've gotten fatter, and my hair's starting to thin), some of it deeper. Who we are is always changing, and difficult to pin down, but it's obvious when people have changed. And one of the many tragedies of Facebook is how it lets you post anything, lets you show your whole ass, and lets your friends silently change their opinion of you in heartbreaking real time.