Twenty Years Later

I'd been reflecting on a few things already over the past few weeks when someone asked the question earlier today, looking back 20 years, if you told yourself ______ you would say BULLSHIT.  The answers were interesting, to say the least. We stayed away from politics, but I would have definitely answered "Donald Trump would be President" among other things.

My answer had to do with friendship.  I had been online since the mid 1980's in bulletin boards and Compuserve.  Twenty years ago, there was still a stigma about meeting people in real life that you'd chatted with online.  People seemed to think only axe murderers and predators would talk to you online.  There was still a huge stigma if you said you were going to meet someone you had chatted with online - as if there was more of a danger in going to lunch with someone you'd spent the last three months chatting with online versus someone you met at the mall, or college, or at a club.

I'd been struggling lately with the concept of friendship.  I have seen friends come and go in my life, although there seems to be quite a few that I've known for a long time.  I think about my life now, and I don't know that I have any close friends that are in close physical proximity to me.  For a while I've been struggling with that, thinking there was something wrong with it.  In the context of that question today, though, I accepted something that kept popping into my head.  My closest friends are my online ones.

When my daughter committed suicide, it seemed like  had good support.  The truth was, people leave eventually.  My grief will be there the rest of my life.  It is a part of me.  I have changed, and I am also learning how to be this new me with the grief always with me.  The person I thought was my closest friend at the time bailed on me in those months after my daughter's death.  I've seen the memes about what to do when someone has died and you don't know what to do.  The truth is, what I most needed was someone to sit with me and watch a movie,  I needed the company of people who could make me laugh again.  One person bailed almost right from the beginning, another a short time later, and another took two years until I felt the distance grow.

I can get online, though, and someone is there.  I can chat about topics I am interested in - geocaching with the friends I've made geocaching.  The site I used to write for is gone, but there are some good people from there on my friends list who are fun to exchange ideas with.  There is political banter, "did you see this?", sports smack talk,, entertainment, and just stupid, sill stuff we see going on and we laugh.  Every now and then I get "how are you doing?" from people.

In all the conversation, I've found a core group of people to be close to.  We share the same interests and enjoy spending time together.  Far from online life isolating me, it's actually made me feel LESS isolated.  I don't feel strange for liking the shows I like on television.  Growing up I was a geek" or a "nerd" for liking the sci-fi shows I watched.  Now we exchange ideas on cliffhangers and mysteries in various shows.  We have watched shows "together" including this year's Superbowl.  I'd rather have done that than been out in a bar where I didn't know anyone else.  We now plan trips together and I'm expanding my horizons to places I never thought I would go, thanks to those friends.  I think because we have each other we're all less lonely.

The definition of friendship has changed, I think, over the last 20 years.  I can't say good or bad - it evolved.  I think we were forced to be more tolerant back then because there was no way to connect to people who were more like us.  On the other hand, it could also be more isolating when you felt like maybe it was you, which is why I can't say it's a bad thing.  Society is evolving, thanks to this new social apparatus.  How it will fit into the future will be interesting to see, in 20 years.






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