I just got reprimanded on FB, and it’s got me down. After my last post about moving to Chicago for the first time after Hurricane Katrina, I got nostalgic and started looking up my old photos. It turned out that I had a bunch of photos from 2005 that weren’t on FB yet. So I started posting them, and tagging the ones where either people looked cute (girls) or cute/funny (guys). I didn’t want to piss off any of my girlfriends by posting a photo where they thought they looked fat or weird or something. We’re such a picky, superficial lot. And I should know – The Man just posted a bunch of photos from our NYC trip and I had to hide half of them from the Timeline because he kept shooting me from really weird angles.

So when I got an email asking me to untag some of the photos I’d tagged an old friend in, at first it didn’t bother me. Then I realized that she meant every single shot, and not because she was concerned that she looked bad. She asked that I untag her because it was a time she’d rather forget. Including a couple of really pretty snapshots of just her and me and another friend.

This was undisputedly the best few months of my life to this point. It just makes me sad that not only does she hate remembering it, she hates everything about it. There were a lot of fun moments. Stress free moments. Just normal partying and being free moments. It seems a shame to cut all of it out, but it’s her choice so of course I removed her name from all of the photos. It makes me so sad that she wants to forget all of us, and the incredible closeness we shared for that short time.

I dunno. To each his or her own. But I like my messy life. I’ve had hard times. I’ve had really terribly shitty times. I’ve made choices that the majority don’t have to make, and gone on to live with the pain, and past the pain, and now over and above the pain. Still, I don’t want to forget a single thing about my life – the bad things helped shape me just as much as the good things did. How can I possibly keep improving if I don’t hold on to every last bit of it?

Sure, there are a couple of people that I could have lived without, but overall, I don’t even want to forget them. Because while they were in my life, they were mostly there for good times. It was only the endings that were bad, and then they were gone. Sometimes the good people and good memories don’t think of themselves in that light, I guess. Sometimes they want to write themselves out of the story. When it comes to that, we must let them.

But not before reminding them to update their privacy settings if they don’t want to get tagged.