Letter to my 418 Facebook Friends

I liken my life (maybe all lives but I will speak only for myself) to a kingdom in reverse. I am the monarch, the major going concern, in the establishment. But is it in reverse because I have next to no power in the kingdom. Like a monarch who allowed his subjects to get carried away with their ideas of people power, I am a slave to the community that peoples my kingdom.
In my kingdom, the community I slave for are my friends, family, colleagues and all other sundry individuals that dot and chain the network that my life is. All my aspirations can be summed into a sentence – things that will impress my friends. All my values are one thing – that which my family approves of. All my day’s labour is but a means to get ahead or at par with the league of workaholics I spend my daylight with.

It is not just that they influence me. My people also have real power over me – information on me.They own my life story. Theyv have been there to witness my most inglorious episodes and moments. The drunken confessions, the lapses in common sense inspired by the folly of new found love, the dark venomous rants of my anger, the shameful moments of greed and selfishness, the animalistic ecstasy of winning of the small wars of my life, the stumbling of my convictions. They have seen it all. They remember it all and they could break me with it if they chose it.
Of course they try to soothe with declarations that they would never chose to break me. But still I sit shifty in the knowledge that they hold it to and perhaps subconsciously delight in holding it. Power is power and the powerless always resent being held at the mercies of the powerful even if only in a merely academic and theoretical way.

I suppose it is some of that resentment that drives me to promiscuity in friends. Promiscuity liberates me. If my life story is scattered in hundreds of status updates each remembered by segments of a universe of 500 friends, then no single person holds enough to have real power over me. It does not empower me but it certainly tips the balance. That is why I amasse you in hordes, dear friends. You are my liberating promiscuity.

Today I flirt with one, tomorrow another. I offload a dark confession and in minutes switch the conversation to a flighty joke. I am a belly dancer and you are my molten audience. I seduce and you come along only to have me shoo you off. Then you turn the game on me. In turns we go each a getting their chance to be a seductive maiden with the universe of oglers. Of course we have intimacy issues and together we feed our well loved disease.