Thankful November: Day 1

Ok, I've been dwelling on this for a couple days.  I'm not going to be doing NaNoWriMo because I have too many work and life commitments right now, and while I'd like to take some extra time to finish my short story, it too may have to wait.  I have some content here I want to write up here, I think I will still do this in between.

Every year many people take the November Thankfulness challenge.  Where they are thankful for something each day in November and they share it with their internet friends and family.  Well I think I will try to do this here (and maybe cross-posting, I'm still undecided on that).  These all will probably not be full blog posts and may not be more than a paragraph or two.  Since I've got all this set up, I'll start day 1 after the jump.

Day 1:


I am very much thankful for all my online friends and my local friends that hang out with me online.  

I've never really fit in anywhere.  In junior high I fell in with a girl who was still very much a child.  I didn't have any other friends and the guys I'd been hanging out with in elementary school were just not who I wanted to be with and were getting into stuff I didn't want to deal with.  So I took the opportunity to have a childhood that I skipped over in elementary school.  It was an awkward time.  I was without a boyfriend for the longest period of my life since I'd started public school.  All the other kids were getting into the whole hormone thing, being adults, and even following politics.  In contrast, I learned all those silly games that everyone else had been playing for the last 5 years where I had been founding a street gang and learning about hormone games, parallel realities, and how to distill alcohol from corn syrup.  It was almost like living backwards for a while.

By high school it was time for me to grow up again and even my friend couldn't deny her hormones forever, even though we did drift apart.  I still didn't belong anywhere.  There were several times where I shifted from one group to the next.  One month sitting with the pregnant girls, the next hanging out with the stoners, then a different group of outcasts.  Eventually, I joined groups like Academic Decathlon, which gave me some purpose to getting out of high school with some semblance of a rational mind.  I was in the band, and there were some guys I considered by closest friends there.  We played Magic, we hung out after sports events, we were silly high schoolers together.  I was never really myslef with anyone.  I was a mirror of whomever I was with.  Sure I liked things and stuff that held my interest was easier to talk about at length, but I didn't have enough confidence in my self to even know who I was.

Then this thing called the internet chat room started being popular.  Sure there were BBCs, but you had to know someone who knew someone and it wasn't straight forward, plus the only place most moms would let you dial was the library (that's not exactly exciting).  Sneaking online in the middle of the night to chat with people in England and Florida (I don't know why he was awake it had to be 5am or later there most of the time).  No one had any expectations of me.  I had no past, I could make my own future.  Shoot if I really blew it I could just change my name and try again!  I also learned about cybering, but that wasn't as important as what I learned about me.  I learned I could be liked and I started to learn who I was. 

Eventually, I got the confidence to decide that I was ok if people didn't like me and that it wasn't my problem if they didn't, it's theirs.  Because this is who I am.  I am straight forward, I don't see the world as a series of steps to death.  I see it as a multi-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.  I want to learn how to move in 3 dimensions in time, not just forward through it and backwards reflecting on it.  I want to comprehend what it looks like to move left and right. 

My online friends, you accept me like this.  You are all over the world, scattered here and there.  Few in any one place.  You put up with my crazy brain games, knowing that I realize that this stuff isn't practical now, but that if more people thought about stuff then the problems would become irrelevant.  You give me an interaction and a comfort that I don't find in my immediate surroundings where things like what color socks I wore with my black pants and how I do my hair detract from getting to know each other.  Where there is so much posturing that we can't cut through the crap and be real with each other. 

Online friends, I would be so alone and lost without you.  You are my everyday sanity, my chosen family.  I am thankful so much to have you in my life!