Reality Finally Sets In

At least a dozen times in the past, I’ve waxed poetic about how the community aspect of journal-land took many of us by surprise. My original "About Me" from 2 ½ years ago cryptically referred to the fact that I was coming off several bad years in a row. I stumbled into the j-land community at a time when I was more than needy.

Within twelve months of putting down my roots in the virtual neighborhood, I had hooked up with more people that I considered friends than I had ever had at any one time in my life. Friends with different lifestyles. Friends from all over the country. I felt so rich.

But I didn’t know—maybe nobody knew—the dynamics of on-line friendships. By the time the second year had passed, the reality of the "community" was beginning to dawn. The transience of the relationships. The "burn-out" factor. The factions, the cliques, the tugs-of-war. Most disconcerting was the way people just…disappeared. You could think you were best buddies with someone one minute, and the next minute, they would just fall off the edge of the earth. Disappear. Go private, or shut down altogether. No explanations, no goodbyes. Journal land became a very odd place to be.

And so it is. Still. None—not one—of my original j-land friends writes with the frequency or the abandon that we used to. For the most part, they don’t even stop by any more…or, if they do, they choose not to leave any evidence thereof. I would love to say that I "get it;" that I understand that the relationships have changed and that I can function just fine with things the way they are. But the truth is, I can’t. It really hurts me. I’ve had too many very important people go out of my life completely over the last decade. People that I loved went away, and I couldn’t stop them. And I feel that I’m going through that all over again, on a smaller but more daily scale, with all my journal friends.

It used to be, you visited a journal, you made some comment—any comment at all just to show you’d stopped by. Now, unless you have "Something" to say, you don’t comment. It just isn’t done. And it’s almost become a game of, "Okay, if you won’t leave a comment for me, then I won’t leave one for you." Some convoluted game of paybacks and wounded feelings.

So now what? Much as I would like to hold this together, I feel like I have no control whatsoever over the direction my journal experience is headed. The handwriting is on the wall for me with some of the people I’ve felt closest to in j-land. I feel like I sign on and just wander around empty hallways that used to be filled with friends chatting and laughing, trading anecdotes and crying on each others’ shoulders. It’s gettin’ kinda lonely out here…