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 worry that people wouldn’t like me, or simply that I hated the introductory period of all friendships where you have to let out minute amounts of strangeness in the hope that the other party likes it.
The reality is that I’ve been making friends online since I was 11 — which sounds less weird in my head — because of EverQuest or random web forums. When I got to New York, I had several friends already there, most of them from a web forum called “Craptown” (I am not kidding), and the rest from those I’d met at Penn State. I’d make a few work friends, but end up making the vast majority of my closest friendships through Twitter.
This is because it is significantly easier to do the feeling-out part of a friendship online, in a few tweets, and then through a few DMs. Starting a friendship in person or through work usually requires an awkward dance of a few in-person conversations, and then at some point people need to exchange numbers, and at…
