A little over a year ago I was talked into getting on FACEBOOK as a social networking tool for my business and I did get a few business contacts from it.
What surprised me was all of the people from my past who magically appeared from out of the woodwork one day. Junior High, High School, College friends and ex-girlfriends, people I had worked with at one time or another and Lifestyle friends and playmates long since forgotten.
In an odd way it was interesting to hear from them. In many ways it was a surreal look through a magic mirror to another time and place I’m not sure I wanted to re-visit.
Someone had posted a question on the Forums in one of my favorite swing sites asking “Has the Lifestyle made you a better person?” They went on to explain they had gotten on to FACEBOOK and had encountered friends from the past, much like I and everyone else on there has, and how he had noticed how much he had changed and yet many of his past compatriots had “let themselves go” or didn’t seem as happy as he was. He was wondering out loud if the Lifestyle had something to do with it.
My response to him was short and probably incomplete, partially because I might say too much but probably more because there wasn’t an easy answer to that on my part.
I had jumped into the Lifestyle at the ripe old age of nineteen. Because of my life experiences up to that point, looking back on it, I seemed to be pre-disposed to have gotten into it. It always felt to be the right place for me to be. There always happens an experience or event in a person’s life that deep down inside you know is the right thing to do and the Lifestyle was one of them for me.
Back then perhaps only a half dozen of my high school classmates shared that feeling (that I was aware of) and college didn’t significantly add to those numbers right away. Now here I am looking at pictures of these people and their families nearly forty years later and wondering…why?
Looking good was always important to me. Not for any vain or egotistical reasons. I just felt better dressing well and staying in shape. Something I still do to this day (give or take a few times dictated by health issues). It was already part of the way I was before I got into the Lifestyle. I couldn’t help but notice how those things became important only after they had done so for many of the people who responded to that forum question.
I looked at the pictures and read the accounts of the lives of the people in my FACEBOOK account and realized that, with the exception of a very few, I had nothing in common with these people anymore. Has my life been so much better than theirs? Probably not…just different. We had been held together by geography before. Now we had different life experiences, goals, ideals and probably different dreams than we once had. They weren’t bad or unfortunate people. They just weren’t the people I knew back then (assuming I knew them that well to begin with),
My best friend in junior high school with whom I raised more than a little hell with and compared notes with while we were learning about sex with our girlfriends back then…is now a minister in a small town in the Northwest and has been for a little over thirty years. My life is as foreign to him as his is to mine these days. We have great respect for each other but the two kids who blew up a telephone pole one afternoon and felt our first naked females don’t exist anymore. Likewise many of the women I dated and/or played with. Many have fond memories of the wild things we did but “couldn’t possibly imagine doing those things now”.
Has the Lifestyle made me a better person? I doubt it. The Lifestyle has never been a charitable endeavor or a philanthropic foundation. Nor has it been a character building experience. Did it lay the foundation for who I am today? Very much so. It allowed me to be ME with very little compromise for the majority of my adult life. The few compromises I did have to make were ones I willingly made knowing what the consequences (if any) would have been.
I don’t have the same hair style I did in high school (duh). I don’t wear the same style of clothing I did, eat the same food, listen to the same music, have the same opinions, same friends and playmates, the same look on life or the same interests I had back then. Did the Lifestyle have anything to do with that? Not as much as one might think (if at all). Chances are that would have happened regardless.
Did the Lifestyle provide me with a road map for my life experiences that fill the volumes of my memories…absolutely. Those may not have happened without it.
The FACEBOOK experience may have opened my eyes or even caused me to take a good look at myself. What it didn’t do was cause me to fall through the looking glass and end up in an Otherworldly Universe.
