Ripples and Ties

One of my very favorite things about social media has been the ability to get to know people in a whole new way.  When I started out in chat, what attracted me to a conversation was a person’s ability to convey a message.  It was all about our written skills and inherent wit and intelligence.  And spelling and grammar were a huge plus too.   As chat grew into our blog community, it became much more visual.  Photos of ourselves and photos of our likes and interests.  I am less of a visual person, in this respect.  I do enjoy posting backgrounds and photos, but it’s overwhelming for me and they need to match my emotion for me to write.  Which is exactly why my blog is simply a black background. I want to feel the energy coming through the words.  The visuals are distracting.  Well, everything is distracting for me, but the visuals are more so.  It’s like thinking at a different speed entirely.

So, for me, it was all about the world we created with our words.  Like soft whispers.  Important, understated and real.  Not to say there wasn’t drama.  There was always drama.  But even behind the drama, there were real people.  That’s something I do my best to never lose sight of.  Laughter is laughter and pain is pain.  It’s all real.  It might be misplaced.  It might be dressed up as something else, but it is the same energy nonetheless.  No different than crying on your crush's shoulder about him, but pretending it is about somebody else.  It happens.  We all go through it.

And then there was Facebook.  Facebook was an entirely different world for me.  It was every group I’d ever been part of or sat on the sidelines of.  Family, childhood friends, friends from middle school.  People from college.  People from high school.  Ex boyfriends.  Their friends.  My parents’ friends.  Adult friends.  Best friends.  People who knew me when.  People who know me now. My priest. People from my daughter’s school.  My husband.  His friends.  His high school friends.  The people I met at HIS reunion.  Every circle overlapping.  Every ripple touching somehow. 

And let me just tell you how weird it is when I have former school board members bantering with my best friend from middle school?  Or how weird it is to get private messages apologizing for bad behavior from 20+ years ago.  Or compliments that took 10 years to be said.  And truths it took hundreds of miles and an ethernet cable to be conveyed.  It’s surreal.  And it’s real.  Very real.

I a firm believer in this medium being a magnifying glass that intensifies certain personalities.  Some of us shine.  Some of us get all blurry and distorted.  And some of us burst into flames.  But when it’s good, when everything clicks, I swear it’s nothing short of a miracle.  It’s a glimpse into someone else’s thoughts.  We get to know things, little things, big things.  We get to share in each other’s private victories and public disappointments.  We are privy to words of comfort and sage advice. We watch other people’s children grow up before our very eyes.  It’s like the largest water cooler on Earth.  At least that’s what it’s like for me.

Next week I will be attending my high school’s 20^th reunion.  I am excited to meet, hug and laugh with people I have grown incredibly very close to over the last 4 years.  It’s an odd idea that I felt very much disconnected from people when I was in high school, but that now, I feel very much a part of their lives.  I know that social media isn’t that for everyone.  I know that it doesn’t have that impact on everyone.  I am just very grateful that it has for me.  It has been very cathartic and it has given me a sense of hometown that I wouldn’t have otherwise had.

It’s an odd way to look back on something that happened twenty years ago.  They weren’t my glory days.  I wasn’t unhappy, but I don’t think they were the best days of my life.  It’s nice to look back and see that maybe I had a second chance, not to re-live anything from my past, but to know the people who were in it.  This is a life filled with people. Connecting with those people is what ties us to it 

The ripples touch and the ties bind.  And I get to enjoy far more than the cliché.