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My writers group met yesterday, in a little coffeeshop where we can enjoy seasonal lattes or handcrafted sodas, while discussing our current projects. We call ourselves the RW (the Rarely Writers), and our meetups are as much about bouncing ideas around or recommending books to one another as they are about reading our work aloud and getting / giving out feedback.

Spending time with others – gathering in-person around a common goal, in a pleasant place – always puts the time I spend online into perspective. Stark, unflattering perspective.

When I was younger (longer and longer ago), being online felt like being in a kind of community. I don’t know if I’m just grouchier, now that I’m fourteen years past my first social media account, but being online doesn’t feel like Cool Community Fun anymore. It feels like those first weeks entering the cafeteria as a college freshman.

So many people . . . so much noise. Everyone’s talking and laughing and – and I don’t know where to sit. I don’t know what to say. Will they all look at me? Or will no one look at me? Which is worse? I want to join in, but . . . how?

In real life, the cafeteria stops feeling like overwhelming mess – becomes a place where you scan for your friends, then grin and hurry over when they wave to you. But it’s a rare online space that ever makes this transition, at least for me. It just . . . keeps on feeling like that big room, echoing with wave upon wave of chatter among strangers. I feel lost in it. I lose track of the time spent online, and when I shake free, I wonder why I feel so empty. It puts me in mind of a bit from The Screwtape Letters:

You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and out-going activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at [last] he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, ‘I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.’ . . . . steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them . . .”

C.S. Lewis

I might simply be uniquely bad at being online, and certainly not all my time on the internet is unfulfilling. But I’m trying to be more careful, about it. More intentional. I believe there are bright fires in warm rooms, out here in this virtual world. Cafeteria tables where it’s safe to sit down. Finding them – creating them – may be a challenge, but, it’s a worthwhile one, I think.

It’s why I’m still in this little corner, and why I’m grateful to anyone who’s stuck around in their own places, still willing to talk, to listen – to share their lives with the rest of us. Thank you, for that. And stay well. <3