Member-only story
I was on a brief vacation last week, and while talking with a friend I’d met there, I heard them talk about how their friends were from work, or from where they grew up, or through their family. It was a nice, normal conversation until I was asked where I knew my best friend from. Or any of my friends.
And that’s when I realized that the majority of the people I speak to and have known for the last ten years have by and large come from the Internet. My best friend Phil, a laser safety technician? The internet. Every single person that works for me? The internet. Of the people on my iMessage pinned messages, five out of six of them come entirely from the internet, and the only reason I’m not writing “six” is because I am not completely sure whether I met my buddy Matt through a work function or through tweeting him Achewood panels.
This is partly a result of me being deeply anti-social as a child, and not particularly social as an adult. Making friends is tough for most people, but for me it was always difficult. I was an overweight, introverted and depressed child that went to a secondary school in England that seemed expressly built for smart, beautiful hunks, where I — undiagnosed with ADHD and also not particularly pleasant already — languished in relative solitude for 7 years.
I went on to university in Aberystwyth, Wales, a place best known for being cold and rainy, and only really broke out of my shell when I spent an exchange year in Penn State. Even then, though, I felt burdened — by the…
