The Evolution of Sharing (aka what I really need right now)

The winter of 97/98 was an interesting time.  Finally I was finding my niche amongst the popular and the unpopular kids, somewhere under the wing of a hard-assed girl you wouldn’t mess with.  Finally I was settling; I felt happier, I ate better and even if I didn’t know which direction I wanted my life to take, I was happy letting it continue.

The internet appeared in our lives almost overnight.  One person, then another and another found their home computers hooked up to their telephones, tying up the phone line, preventing others from making and receiving calls.  We would huddle around computers whilst one of us typed messages to strange boys on the other side of the country, giggling as their boyband good looks filtered through onto the screen.  There was an innocence to it all, flirting with these boys that we would never meet, never have any intention to meet.  Yahoo messenger was our toy and, unlike our parents our younger siblings, we were proficient in its use.

Whilst my friends were happy with their lot, I painstakingly built a website with the most rudimentary html.  Angelfire was my new best friend and I loved those black pages with their lime green text as if they were a child of my own.  Those words were my diary and they were the closest thing to the truth that I could say.  I forewent the chatrooms on Yahoo that my friends rushed to every evening, instead finding my comfort in the spaces on the net where the geeks congregated.  In our own ways we were all geeks then, the newly easy access to such technology bringing out the excitement from within us.

Slowly I made friends, speaking to those same 14 year old geeks night after night was comforting.  In some ways we understood each other better than those in our real lives.  Things were very distinct then; real life and your internet self.  My name was Jaxia.  Without having to look a person in the eye I could be cool and confident; I had the knowledge to back my claim up.

Those new friends introduced me to ICQ and as those in my real life lost interest in the internet world they had so intently pursued in the past six months, I threw myself deeper in.

College came and as I grew more depressed, losing myself in the music I listened to and the words that I laid on pages of a notebook, that world was the one who took me in.  The internet was a place where I didn’t have to be afraid.  If I felt like I couldn’t carry on there were people who would carry me, people who wouldn’t judge me for what I thought or felt.

I drifted into poetry, and with it a new set of friends.  I felt so comfortable because although those words of fiction were not quite as fictional as they might seem I had found a group of people who were not afraid to tell me what they thought.  At times their words may have seemed harsh, but they shaped me into a better writer.  When the group disbanded a few of us held on to those tenuous shreds of the friendships we’d formed.  They were the ones that lasted for a time.

The year ended and between college and working and drinking the internet lost its hold on me.  Those friendships that I’d so carefully created all but fell by the wayside.  It’s more difficult to keep in touch when your friends can’t make it round to your house to drag you out of your depressed and drunken stupor. 

Then it all came crashing down.  I slipped from the edge that I had been teetering on for so long and fell into the abyss.  I was unrecognisable but so much of me didn’t want to change that.  In a moment  of clarity I built another website.  Even now I can’t tell whether it was for revenge or release, but I doubt it ever crossed the paths of the objects of my anger. 

I wrote.  Everything that crossed my broken my made its way onto those dusty rose pages that held my life.  I thought of myself as that thumbsucking fairy who’d lost her wings, not quite in this world but not quite in the other.  All I had were my words.

It was an outlet, but not a support, and like so many things that site fell to the wayside. 

Life carried on, I struggled, and when I came to realise what I needed to do I went back to that site.  I changed my life, turned it around, and found a little shred of happiness in doing so.  And I went back to that site and I wrote.  The little details, thoughts, feelings, they appeared once more on those fragile pages that held the pain I had felt over a year before.

This time was different.  The truths that I wrote had lost their bitterness, even when there was sorrow there was happiness between the lines.  If I drifted away I also drifted back, the intent was always there, even if the means weren’t. 

I wrote through happiness and I wrote through pain.  When I was falling apart from the inside out I wrote and I felt better for a moment, even if not for long.  People came and I went.  We supported one another through the ups and the downs.  There was always someone listening and always someone willing to offer a hug or kind words. 

Some of us have followed each other’s lives for so long, and so closely, that it feels as if I know you better than many of the friends I can reach out and touch.  Yet sometimes it’s not enough.  Sometimes I want to reach out and hug you, because it’s clear that’s, more than anything, what you need.  Sometimes I really want to give you a good ol’ slap and tell you to pull yourself together, because sometimes you truly deserve it.  But distance and a faint smattering of anonymity hold me back.  Sometimes I need someone to hold me and tell me it’ll all be ok, but it’s just too difficult to get that across with words that don’t always say what they need.

It’s been a long time now.  1997 seems a life time away, but friends do not.  Many of the friendships forged through blogging circles seem closer, more solid, than some of those I hold in real life.  Many of my readers have seen a side of me, the real me, that people in real life just don’t get close to.  The lines now are blurring.  Those internet friendships are creeping their way into real life and for a while I felt confused.  Should the internet cross over into real life or real life cross over onto the internet?  Should I worry if real life sees the facets that the internet does, and should I worry if the internet sees how superficial real life can be?

Right now I want to sparkle, to glitter in the sun that all but seems to have disappeared under the haze of winter’s cold.  I’m feeling lost again, somehow torn between the different ways that life pulls: what I want, need, have and have let slip away.  They’re all different, but all the same, and somehow don’t reconcile.  I don’t know where to stand.