I'm so bad at maintaining interpersonal relationships that I can't even make friends on the internet. I want to, but then I get stressed out about doing everything perfectly and assume everybody will think I'm a boring/loser/idiot/fuck even though I objectively know I'm not (or at least not very).
It makes me sad because I have a pretty unusual life. It's not spectacular or glamorous or anything, but it's different and I feel like it would be nice to share it sometimes. Also, I have pretty interesting thoughts every once in awhile and I have no one to talk to about things. Sad face.
Is it even possible to have social phobia on the internet? Most people who can't make friends in real life love their internet communities but I find it as stressful as the real thing, perhaps more so. In real life things you say and do normally aren't recorded and then open for every single person in the universe to see. And usually its in the moment, you're not sitting there, deliberating the exact phrasing of every response, carefully carving and editing your identities, worrying about how your computer-using grandmother will react to photos of you smoking on your friends back porch last night or how people will be offended if you don't give them access to your entire life.
I don't have facebook. Sometimes opening my email inbox makes my palms sweat.I can't fucking handle it. I've started a blog ten times and I always delete it as soon as I feel too exposed, even in anonymity.
“I am every comment you ever stressed over in a message board. I am your labored maximalist/minimalist “About Me”. I am every flagrant sense of disregard in a precisely tailored word. I am your casual profile picture you cropped painstakingly. I am the cringing expression you make in Photobooth at the term “web personality.” I’m just trying to keep it all separate from, but attractively aligned with you. Are you exhausted at all by you being you? Not me.”
(exerpt from a prose poetry type article called “The Internet Gives Me Social Anxiety” by Mathew Dekneff at http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/the-internet-gives-me-social-anxiety/)
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