i don’t know if it’s amusing, impressive, or scary how easy it is to do a facelift of your personal history. our brains are capable of a makeover so effective that we forget the “before” pictures ever existed and move forward in life with a new reality. i’m not referring to coping with trauma. i’m talking about the details of an event or period of time that we wish were just a little bit different. so often those details get airbrushed in our minds, just enough to take the edge off the awkward, insecure, and embarrassing memories. and then there’s the material evidence. sometimes snapshots of these moments facilitate the fib (“look how happy i am smiling at that awful party.”) and sometimes the photos belie the distorted recollection (“wow, i was a bit heavier than i remembered.”)
for the past few weeks i’ve been scanning a lot of my old photos into flickr, to preserve them before they fade or get lost, but also because i enjoy browsing and organizing my pictures on the computer. (life is just too good not to enjoy the high points again and again.) it seems incomprehensible now, but i don’t have to go back many years to arrive at my pre-digital, 35mm photos. (other than a photography course in college, my photographs processed from film are not the admirably artistic kind – we’re talking disposables and point-and shoot models here.)
in some aspects the photos are an annoyingly accurate record-keeper. there’s no denying the bad perm, buck teeth, or gigantic glasses – photoshop is no help there. but other times photographs are a misleading illusion. and i don’t just mean a funny camera angle. i’m talking about the posed moments created especially for the benefit of the camera – a shiny façade glossed on top of the truth. either way, the pictures always bring a jolting rush of emotion. as i viewed each print, i laughed, i gasped, i awwwed, i sighed, i cringed. i felt happy, sad, excited, irritated, nostalgic, nervous, and loved. i felt whatever i had been feeling at the moment the photo was snapped.
for the most part, i love that emotive response to reliving freeze frames from the past – i’ve lived a full, charmed, ambrosial 30 years. but occasionally the scenes roused old insecurities that have lain dormant for a long time. i was instantly transformed from a confident, successful adult into a gawky junior high kid again. this phenomenon of being confronted with buried sentiments reminded me of a question recently posed by my friend laura: to reconnect or not to reconnect? she pondered the emotional effects of renewing lost social ties online, and posited that perhaps we’re all just a little too available. i think i’ve found a response to the examination of why social media can make grown adults regress back to teenagers.
nearly a year and a half ago there was an article in the new york times titled brave new world of digital intimacy. (you may have to create a free account with NYT to view the entire piece.) in the article, social psychologists compared the advent of incessant online contact to living in a small town where everyone knows your business. now that we never lose touch with old friends, we are always trapped in that community we grew up in.
Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city…a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem.
this “ambient awareness,” where every move is observed and shared, is reminiscent of high school. when you’re constantly aware of your friends’ activities, you tend to compare and measure every accomplishment, good fortune, and exciting event against your own. and with everyone trying mightily to paint a beautiful, exotic, auspicious existence to the online world, it’s easy to feel inadequate.
fortunately, past teenage anxiety doesn’t stay long enough to even shake off the dust, and i welcome the vast majority of memories and reconnections. but it’s still strange to me how a stroll down memory lane can be as mood altering as the original experience.
