Not too long ago, I wrote a post about how I was going to try to reclaim my love of the online world after all of the ugliness surrounding the death of Trey Pennington in early September.
Although I hate to admit it, I am not having a whole ton of success.
Part of the issue is time. Social Media is like those spider webs Frodo gets caught in when he gets stuck in Shelob’s lair. The more you move around, the more tangled up you get. You get tangled up with people. You get tangled up with new platforms, then newer platforms. Writing for one site becomes writing for 27. Somehow. It seems like it all happens accidentally, and yet…
Part of the issue too though is that there has just been a steady marching parade of scenarios that have worn me down a bit. I have weathered a lot of it pretty well I think, like that person who co-created something with me writing a post about how stupid it was. That kind of stunk, but so it goes. Being bullied by someone and having people around you “lol” was kind of a bummer too.
But really, what I’m struggling most with is the death of Bruce Serven. Not necessarily his death, which would have been sad enough, but the manner of his death. See, Bruce had his Twitter account set up to tweet my posts whenever I’d publish them, so I would see his Twitter avatar every day. He’d comment quite often here on my blog. We’d chat. I promoted him as one of the top 60 men in the online world, in fact.
And then I found out that before taking his own life, this man who I saw on my little screen every day killed his son. His infant son.
I can’t say that I am mourning this as a friend would. But that’s the point. I can’t really picture Bruce without the sombrero he’s wearing in his Twitter avatar picture. I have no idea what he looked like over the last few months. What did his voice sound like? I promoted this person and viewed him as someone who might become a friend at some point, and I had no idea how broken he really was.
True, this can happen in offline relationships too. I get that. But this event made me realize that I need to back away a bit from the online world for awhile.
I will not leave the online world entirely. I’m not sure that’s entirely possible once you get started. You meet too many people you enjoy conversing with. But I will not be doing my weekly Tweetdiner chat for awhile, anyway. And I won’t be tweeting and blogging as much as your’re used to.
I hesitated writing this post because it can seem like such a “pay attention to me” thing. But really I just felt it would be irresponsible to just pull back with no warning.
I hope you can understand.
And thank you!
Image by Dave Edmonds. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/bluehor