This is more of a brainfart than anything, but with some serious undertones.

I got into using FB only about a year ago: I'm 58, don't know how to use the dvr, just learned about Netflix on my iPhone, just got an iPhone 2 Christmases ago... basically I'm still in the 20th century.

Anyway, I got into FB because I found a cousin on Ancestry.com I didn't know I had while doing Ancestry.com research. She persuaded me to join FB. Now, you must understand that I'm more than a bit of a loner, what with social anxiety and a touch of Asperger's.

Bit by bit I'm finding more relatives, and even classmates from grammar school in the 1960s. It's fun making silly posts back and forth, no drama or anything like that. Just adults having fun like kids.

OK, so what's the problem? Understand, I've never ever in my life been a jealous or envious person, so this is not grounded in jealousy or envy as we usually think of it. I see the family pictures of all these people, I see the jobs they hold, that they are now grandparents, what they've accomplished, and so on and I'm beginning to compare myself and my life, and feel "inadequate"... OK, I feel like a failure.

The ambivalence about FB is that on one hand I am glad to be part of the world, so to speak, "meeting" all these people. Yet I am embarrassed of my home (it's a mess), my financial situation (there's no number small enough to represent my credit score, therefore fixing up the house is out of the question, not to mention the mortgage being so far behind), that I am socially awkward, and am not a good speaker (I write better than I speak), and so on.

Every choice I've ever made has been just that, a choice, and my choice... mistakes and all. I blame no one for anything. But I can't shake this feeling of being, in plain English, a loser. FB has been great for finding people I lost contact with, or relatives I never knew about, but sometimes I think it might have been better to have stayed under my rock.