A Different Kind of Identity Theft

I got a Facebook friend request from an old friend the other day that I used to work with. I accepted the request because it seems like this is a theme in my life lately, reconnecting with old friends and acquaintances. So in the process of catching up, he told me that he’d recently been a victim of identity theft. Well of course the first thing I thought of was ruined credit, fighting with the banks, police reports. I gave my condolences and then he went on to say that it was not what I was thinking.

He used to have a journal of sorts a few years ago that he just stopped updating. He made it clear that it wasn’t a blog because he wasn’t really interested in trying to think of content. I could see where you could define a blog as topic driven and a journal as well, “I ate too much cheese and now I can’t poop,” type of daily stuff. That’s how my friend explained the difference.

Apparently when he sold his old computer to his former roommate, he forgot to clean out everything. One of the things he forgot was his online journal with its ‘password remembered for this site’ option turned on. He said that the guy edited the title, changed the email, got rid of the pictures, and made it his own. Except he left the online journal as it was and continued to add to it.

My friend only discovered it because the two of them had two friends, one them a really good friend of his and the other one really good friends with his former roommate. So when the one guy says, hey, you should check out my buddies blog, because by this time it have morphed from a journal to blog, he started to recognize some facts and figures. Not letting on about his suspicions, he asked his friend if he could email him the link.

When he forwarded that link to my friend and told him what he suspected, he was stunned. Not so much that his former roommate had done. He wasn’t surprised to hear that because I guess the guy was a lazy malcontent. It was the fact that this dumbass was passing what my friend called his boring life off as his own. I guess the sad fact is this; the fact that eating too much cheese and not being able to poop may actually be a step up from where someone sees themselves.

So after a couple of angry emails, a few heated voicemails and apparently one face to face showdown, the guy took down the blog and promised to never pose as my friend ever again. The tougher conflict though was that my friend kind of took it as an odd sort of compliment. As a result, he took a deeper look at all the different elements of his life. Then he started to understand why his former roommate stole his identity.

He gets along with his family and every year they try to make time to see each other not just for the holidays, but during the year. He said that when they get together for Thanksgiving, they have a game that they play where they have three boxes. In the first one are the 12 months of the year. In the second one are four pieces of paper, numbered one through four. In the third box are places that everyone in the family has agreed they would like to visit. Before Thanksgiving dinner, while the turkey is resting before being cut, they have a family meeting and they draw one piece of paper from each box. And that is how they decide on the family vacation for the coming year. They spend the entire dinner, eating and making plans and dreaming of all the fun and adventures that they'll have.

And that is just one example of how this guy lives his life. There is a sense of being connected to the people in his life. There is an acceptance of the unknown. There is a sense of adventure. There is plenty of gratitude. There is a solid foundation of friends that care and family that’s there. As I put it to him, who wouldn’t want to have all that? And as he reminded me, sometimes we just need to look a little deeper at ourselves to see that we already have everything we need.