my experience with being chronically online

 To what piece of technology would you write a “love letter”?

I think this question is worded a bit strangely, but I assume it is asking for what technology I have been most positively affected by. My answer to that would be the internet. I know this answer sounds corny, but it’s true. The internet is the reason why I have not been completely isolated from human connection. 

During high school, I had trouble finding friends. I didn’t have this problem in elementary school or middle school, but the only friend that went to high school with me transferred somewhere else by the end of subfreshman year. During freshman year, I had no friends, but I thought that was fine. I thought it wasn’t a big deal to have no friends and that it might be even a good thing because I get to focus on myself and have more time. 

At the time, I had been using the internet often. Something you should know about me is that at the time (and even now) I had a strong interest in geometry dash, specifically the level creating scene. Therefore, I would spend a lot of time commenting and posting on geometry dash related places on the internet. This would be the case for not only freshman year but also sophomore year and most of junior year. Looking back, I do think it wasn’t the best idea to start using the internet so frequently due to the risk of it reducing my productivity (which it did), but I think the events that happened from me using the internet helped a lot with my mental health because I had somehow gained some popularity among people in this community. People would recognize me and praise the things I made. It was the most respected I had felt up to that point in my life. I still didn’t have any friends, but that would soon change.

 One day, I came across a post made by someone asking if anyone wanted to join a geometry dash collaboration level they were hosting. Since I didn’t have any pending projects at the moment, I figured I could join it. This simple action would greatly change my life. I was immediately taken to a server with about 20 other people who were also interested in the project, and these people, along with several more that would join later, would become what I consider my best friends. Talking with this group of people, as opposed to posting comments for a large community like I had always been doing, truly made me remember what it meant to have a friend group. We would talk about our interests, create and reference inside jokes, play games together, have arguments sometimes, help each other out, and just have fun. 

Experiencing this made me change my view about having friends - I no longer thought socializing was a waste of time and I actively wanted to have a real life friend group. In fact, because of this motivation, I actually was able to make 1 real life friend at the end of junior year. Unfortunately, my friendship with this person has been going horribly, but since I’ve done it once, I’m relatively confident I can do it again in college and find people there that I can hopefully connect with as well as I have connected with my online friends. 

I am not very active on the internet anymore, mainly because of the sheer amount of work I have been needing to do, but the impact it made on me will probably last for the next decade or so. I know the internet can be a dangerous place, and many bad things have come from it, but my personal experience with it has allowed me to connect with people in a way that’s really meaningful to me. I think it’s amazing that such a technology exists.