Erin Palette writes a powerful post. Short excerpt:
God bless the Internet. Online, people judge you by the quality of your output, and not by appearance. They get to know your soul before they let the prejudices of the eyes and the flesh influence their judgement. It was on the internet that I finally found not just acceptance, but solace: people liked me for me, and they weren’t looking at me or judging me. I was safe. I had found my armor, my mask, my perfect little seashell, and I polished its interior until, shining like a mirror, I could fool myself into thinking my social prison was boundless and infinite.
A mirrored cage is still a cage.
Thus I toiled, happy in my self-induced solitude, until I stumbled upon the world of the gunblogs. All it took was for me to say “Hey, I like shooting too!” and suddenly I was one of you. It didn’t matter what I looked like or who I wanted to have sex with; I was part of the Tribe of the Gun. That I could write well only made me popular, but it didn’t make me any more likable.
And that’s when I noticed the walls of my cage were keeping me from meeting people who wanted to meet me, and that made me ache in ways I thought were no longer possible. I had rediscovered loneliness.
Slowly… very, very slowly… I started to come out of my shell. I decided to take a chance on people who seemed like good sorts, expecting that every time I made myself vulnerable that I would be hurt beyond my capacity to recover.
This never happened.
RTWT.
As Breda once said on an episode of Vicious Circle:
I’m one of those people – I like people, I’m personable, but I don’t really have “friends” friends, because I just don’t connect to people really that well. But then blogs happened, and I found a whole group of people that I fit in with because I’m weird and they’re weird in kinda the same way, and yea for our mutual weirdness. So, thank you for being weird with me.
Can I get an “AMEN!”?