wait, where's everyone going?

[newandexcitingshapes]

 

Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it. It simply was, like his double-jointed thumb or the funny little jag inside one of his front teeth, the little jag his tongue began running over whenever he was nervous.

i assume, if you're reading this, that i don't have to tell you how lonely i often am.

 

i feel like, in some ways, i've always been kind of lonely. i'm sure that's not original of me to say, nor surprising, if you really consider the cocktail of mental illness, queerness, fatness, probable autism, and just weirdness that has accompanied me most of my life. 

i've never been - or at least, felt - very popular or cool. but as far back as i can remember, i have had this, like. obsessive fixation on friendship: how do you get there, how do you deepen it, how do you know how close you are, how do i achieve that kind of magic soul-bonded best friendship you see in books and movies and tv shows? and i've never really figured it out, you know. 

i think mindy kaling said in the mindy project somewhere that "best friends isn't a title, it's a tier," and that's stuck in my brain for, what, probably a decade now? and in its way, that's helped - helped me sort through the obsessive classification of who and what a Best friend is, how you determine who they are and whether you are Best to them, too. i always wanted a mutual best friendship, and there are times in my youth when i'd thought i had it, but inevitably those would drift, or turn sour, or we'd lose each other some other way.

honestly by the time i was almost out of high school, i was relying heavily on the internet for friendship, for my most important social bonds and interactions. i think when i think of myself in my late teens, i do think of how intensely lonely i felt, despite having a so-called best friend, two, in fact, until the dramatic friendship breakup message that blindsided me and left me bruised for a couple years. and that probably didn't help, with the relying-on-online-connection thing. 

i've talked before about how i've been online most of my life, but i never really got the hang of making friends online until those late teens, and livejournal,  twitter, and tumblr. a friend who was half-online, half-irl got me into tumblr, and it's hard to argue that i ever looked back. between lj, twitter, and tumblr, i made some bonds that still continue to this day.

with the passage of time, and drifting through eras of my life and different fandoms, i've made some of the most important friends of my life -   whether through being overly kind in their tumblr ask box one day when they were talking about their synesthesia or reading and screaming about their fanfiction, there are people i might never have known if not for the internet, for social media spaces, for the way you can get to know someone without seeing their face in person. 

and those bonds, they vary, right? just as you do with any friendship. i'm extremely close to some, and others i simply have lived in the same online neighborhood for years, or we've stopped having the same things in common but still walk by each others' twitter porches, or we get invited to the same digital parties. you know? there are people i know exactly how we met and there are people i've simply been friends with for longer than i can recall. and that's okay, i think - something i am having to remind myself often is that you don't have to be best friends with everyone you've ever met. but you can also be friends without knowing each other like the back of your hand. 

something i wish we talked about more - and what i'm getting around to, here, or trying to - is those internet friends you've simply...lost. they logged off one day and never logged back on. or livejournal went out of style and you never found them on tumblr. that kind of thing.

i was once really good friends with someone, i'll call her christine. we bonded on livejournal and on twitter, and then something happened to her and she stopped using twitter, and i stopped using livejournal. we had become facebook friends at some point (back when you friended anyone you'd ever spoken to, remember that?) and i saw that she was still out there, somewhere, but i hadn't seen her in so long. 

then one day she appeared, like magic, on my tumblr dashboard. it was christine, and she remembered me, and we became friends again, and talked, and had things in common again/still, and it was a relief, to know that she was still out there.

and then she disappeared again.

christine had extenuating life circumstances i won't get into, but years went by, and there was no sign of her on her facebook, and i wondered if she was still out there, somewhere, and i hoped that was the case but had no way of proving it. i don't think i ever knew her last name. 

i thought about her a lot in those years. i wondered if she was still online. if she wasn't online, i wondered if she was still alive. more than once, i sent her messages on tumblr, just to say, i am thinking of you. whether or not you are here, you are being remembered somewhere.

and then one day, her old tumblr account had a post letting us know that she'd remade, and we could reconnect if we wanted to. 

i think i cried. i was just so glad to know that she was there, somewhere in the world, posting about the things that brought her joy among hardships. i said hello, and i'm not sure if she remembered me this time - i go by a different name now - but i just wanted her to know how happy i was to see her again. 

christine logged off again a few months ago, and i don't know if i'll ever see her again. i think i got lucky, finding her a third time. but it still mattered to me. 

there are other people i've lost along the way. the online/irl friend from lj and twitter, we bonded over broadway musicals and watched the tony awards together, and when i went off to college, we drifted. but i found them again on gay pirate twitter, of all things, a few years ago, and dm'd her to say hi, remember me? and she did. and even though we haven't spoken again since, i know where to find her now. i could try again. i feel a sort of peace knowing she's still online, just as i am.

the last few months, people have been talking about moving off certain social media platforms, whether it's unplugging entirely or just escaping from specific ones. no one i talk to regularly uses facebook anymore. tiktok played nice with trump upon threat of deletion in the US, and anyway, it's destroying my attention span. and twitter? twitter sucks now even if musk hadn't done a nazi salute twice live on air. 

so i get it, really. i know i'm trying to spend less time scrolling when i could be engaging in other, healthier ways of spending my time. 

but every time someone logs off for too long, i get so scared. 

i'm connected to most of my friends in at least two ways - across platforms or via phone number or discord. but there's something so different, to me, about a text conversation one-on-one versus just passively watching someone exist online and striking up a conversation whenever one of you has something to comment on. maybe that's lazy, or maybe i'm just anxious. but losing that sort of passive in to a conversation, or a way to just sort of wave hi to let them know you're there by liking a post, i think that's valuable in its own way. 

i'm trying to directly interact with people more, to build stronger and less online-only bonds, or at least ones less restricted by platforms owned by the shittiest people alive, but it's hard! it's hard. i know it's rewarding, but i'm never one hundred percent sure it's wanted. that part's a me issue, though. 

crowe likes to say that the internet is their hometown, and they use twitter like a gigantic group chat. i feel very similarly. i have two locked twitters: one for friends made via tumblr (or, more or less, pre-2020) and one for friends made via clowntown twitter. they are each very special to me, and i do see those timelines as big group chats where you can choose to engage in a thread of conversation or not. but people are moving away from these neighborhoods, either to bluesky, or to less and less posting. 

i have a bluesky account, and i'm trying to get in the habit of using it. i've only got one timeline there, now, a mix of friends older and newer, and while it is taking some adjusting to see ex-clowns and mutuals from 2012 in the same space, i think it's probably good for me to compartmentalize less. 

but i also, kind of, sorry i know it's bad, don't want to leave twitter. i like it there. i have lived there for so long. there are friends there who are no longer with us - whether they've moved offline, or, in a couple of cases, moved on from this lifetime - and i like being able to revisit the moments we had. the things they had to say while they were still here.

i wish i could go to people and say, please: i know why you're moving platforms or logging off. i understand. but please, don't vanish from my ecosystem entirely. i want to know what you're up to, how you're doing - i want to know you're still out there.

maybe this is all a bit maudlin. maybe i'm being crazy over a million things at once and this is just what came out. but i wanted to get it down. i wanted to share it with you.  

 

Comments

[inthedevastatedcity]

I was like WAAAH I FEEL SO EMOTIONAL BEING REFERENCED IN ONE OF JD'S BEAUTIFUL MEMOIR POSTS LIKE I'M A CHARACTER HOW DO I TELL HIM and then realised, oh my god im on his blog. hi jd it made me feel really emotional to have you say "crowe describes the internet as their hometown". anyway yeah i feel so much of this, deeply and painfully. i've lost track of people i shouldn't have, so many times! there are old old old internet friends i remember and am like, oh my god we would not have anything in common now. did you change like i changed? or are you still Back There? and the joy of like, old old old casual friends you keep reconnecting with over the years. like there is a real crazy tenderness to someone who you've never been Close to but who you have been mutually fond of for decades. like I mentioned in the group chat the other day an OLD old old tumblr friend just sent me a little manila envelope full of his handmade zines and stickers and he took a polaroid for me of my best friend the Astor Place cube. I've absorbed so many little things about punk rock history and gay male queer history from him for HALF MY LIFE without us really having any actual conversations until recently. but the bond is real and tender and loving! we saw these stupid old versions of each other! and we wern't even really friends then! but we keep seeing new versions of each other that get closer and closer and that's so cool and insane and such a weird genre of several-decade friendship, becoming the same type of person suddenly after years and years and years. anyway. idk. i love you. i'm glad you got in my askbox that one time, you're one of the best and most important people i;ve ever not met. <3 <3 <3

[newandexcitingshapes]

wahhh love you muchly and i'm very honored to have these rambling posts described as "memoir" <3