Oddly enough, the person I chat with the most on Facebook (which isn't saying much, how little I visit it) is my ex-girlfriend from college.
We dated for three and a half years and it didn't end pretty. The breakup had nothing to do with me being gay; it would be a couple of more years before I faced that reality.
She must know I'm gay, either through the grapevine or just skimming over my page. It's a subject we've both tacitly chosen to ignore, along with her rampant infidelity all those years ago. Bygones.
At any rate, she's become a one-stop clearinghouse for news about all our former classmates and from every corner of the country the news is grim.
Just a few years ago, when we all discovered Facebook, it seemed as if everyone was doing really well. But the Perfect Storm of the Great Recession and the sudden lurch to all things digital has left all of us on the ropes. Only one person from our group is doing well these days, a guy who jumped early into the video game world. By all accounts he's quite the muckety muck in that business. But the rest of us? Not so much.
Those of us with agency jobs found ourselves at that age when we were considered both expensive and expendable. Every last one of us was downsized and no one has recovered. The people who were doing well with commercial art and design and photography are all scrambling to find anything. The venues for that work are all dead and dying. Magazines and books and newspapers are all going digital and fancy schmancy illustrations and photos just slow download time. If they must go with an image, most people just pick up a stock image online for $10.
She ran through the litany of woes, people who haven't worked at all in the past two or three years, people who've lost their homes, one guy who took a job as a checker at the supermarket just so he could get insurance for his family.
And strangely, I took a lot of comfort from that. It's really easy to start down the slippery slope of depression and regret, to get swallowed up in the belief that you've failed, and failed big time. Knowing it isn't just me is probably enough to get me through another day.
