Drowning in the Past

I've been spending too much time in the past lately. Facebook can do that to a person. Daily cyber-stalking-spying on your high school crush (Is he gross now, or pretty cute for an old guy?) or the mean girl who made your middle-school years a living hell (Please, PLEASE let her be fat now.) can take one's focus away from the here and now (Crap, my kid's bus will be here any second!). Facebook makes it really easy to lose yourself in the minutia of someone-you-haven't-seen-in-25-years-and-never-really-liked-to-begin-with's life.

But even before Facebook (the horrors!), my brain spent too much time dwelling on the past. I'm one of those people who like to pore through old photo albums--other people's as well as my own. Over and over again. I'm strange like that. I've always dwelled on the past, even when I was too young to have a past of my own. Then I would just obsess over previous eras and the people who glamorized them (Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Charles Manson, etc.).

Would 15-year-old me
say I made the best
choices in life so far?

But Facebook makes it much easier to regress.

I'm not sure why I do this. My life these days is pretty ideal, if I do say so myself. It's just as I'd hoped and imagined it would be...well, pretty much. No one gets everything they've ever wanted in life. I'm a little less rich than I'd hoped. But I have a lovely husband who makes me laugh, two super-adorable, smart, healthy kids, and a pretty house in a nice neighborhood. The American dream, baby.

I'm happier now than when I was a teenager or young adult, so why do I find myself reliving the past so often? Am I trying to reassure myself that I chose the correct path? Am I testing the waters? Dipping my toes in Lake What-Could-Have-Been in the hopes of finding the water horribly cold and brackish? That sounds about right.

I just hope I don't fall in and drown.