Sylvia's Journal

I don’t know if curiosity about other people’s lives drove me to psychology or whether psychology made me more curious. Maybe both are correct.

The social networking sites are a dream come true for me. Not only do they show what goes on in the lives of other people I am interested in, care for or am curious about, they also keep me connected in ways that would have required a huge amount of work before (and therefore often did not happen).

We learned about the (healing) power and saving grace of a strong network when you are in trouble as we were last year. Also, the older I get the more I realize that nothing important gets done without the help and support of others, doors stay closed, knowledge obscure, etc. And finally, seeing the life throbbing through places like Facebook or Myspace or any of the thousands of more specialized networks give me hope that when push comes to show, we are there for each other and this isn’t such a vast cold place with people glued to their screen, disconnected. On the contrary, I see my younger colleagues (few of the older ones are on Facebook) embedded in a life fabric that is much richer than what I see at work. I see colleagues who left MSH, sometimes intensely angry and frustrated or bored out of their minds, who found the right place, doing important and meaningful work and being happy; I stay in touch with the ones who went on to study, and can cheer them on in ways I would not have been able to do before.

This is all about the here and now, or at least my connections from the last 10 years or so. But what is also beginning to happen is that characters from my Dutch life in the 60s and 70s are beginning to pop up, one by one, with pictures, memories, news on him or her that you would only get at school reunions. In Holland we don’t quite have those the way Americans do; besides, they would not be accessible even if there were any. My high school in Haarlem had a celebration of its 600th year sometime in the 1990s (it was founded in the 1300s!) and I missed it.

One of the things I found on Facebook is a bunch of photos from a car accident that looked very scary; they were posted on the site of my friend Pia. I discovered she was in an accident that could have killed her, just weeks ago. I now know four people (five if I count myself) who have recently survived something that is rather miraculous. You’d think we still have something important to do in life.