On My Experience w/ Internet Presence

You miss the feeling of starting a blog, the excitement, the almost idyllic fear of creating a blog, of choosing that first template, picking out colors, adding and moving gadgets around in the design—before knowing anything about HTML alterations / customizations—, thinking about what to write for that very first blog post, filling the sidebar with links to your published work, emailing writers you like to ask if you can link to their blogs—hoping they reciprocate.

The excitement of that very first encouraging comment about your writing, the first time someone comments a second time, a third. The first second person to comment. The first third.

There’s maybe no better feeling than communicating with people who seem to share certain ideas about life, about writing and literature, particular worldviews, sense of humor, common interests you’ve failed to find with people you’ve met in real life.

There’s no better feeling than communicating with people you’ve never met, no better feeling than not having to communicate with people in real life.

Unfortunately, as time goes on, the people you once frequently communicated with online inevitably, for whatever reason, move on: They’ve lost interest in your writing, in your blog posts; your sense of humor and worldview are maybe not as compatible with theirs as they once seemed; they’ve found other writers in which they feel more interested or with whom they feel more of a connection. For whatever reason. You begin to realize, people don’t change. People aren’t different just because you’ve never met them.

It’s inevitable that you and the people you’ve never met should eventually part ways. Ultimately, the internet feels like it's not really a place to truly connect with anyone, despite how much you want to believe it is. (Of course, you don’t really 'know' the people you’ve met in real life, either—yourself, for that matter.) Tenuous and ephemeral, you often feel social media serves only to further isolate you.

Still, despite your anxieties, your insecurities, you need to feel you’re connected to something, to someone, somehow. That you're connecting with other people without having to actually do it. You’re living vicariously through yourself. This may be why you search the internet for relationships with people you’ve never met. People just like you. This may be why it’s harder to let go of people you’ve never met. Sometimes people you’ve never met are all you have left.