We are all afraid of being alone.<\/p>\n
We all went to the web to find out if the question we all had in our heads was true.<\/p>\n
Am I alone?<\/strong><\/p>\n Does anyone else feel like I do? Am I the only one who feels this way?<\/p>\n No.<\/strong><\/p>\n We aren’t alone. That’s what the Internet was able to show us.<\/p>\n Back when it was the\u00a0Information Superhighway<\/em>\u00a0or the\u00a0World Wide Web<\/em>. It was a big, flashing neon sign attracting nerds like flies.<\/p>\n I was one of those nerds. I was drawn to the flame. I craved the warmth and acceptance of other people like me. But I had no idea where to find them.<\/p>\n I grew up in a county with one school. One middle school. One high school. One.<\/p>\n I went to high school with about 500 other people. I graduated in 2000 with 167 peers.<\/p>\n It was a small place and in that place I was the freak, the outcast. I was big enough to be the ideal football player. With no interest in being a tackling dummy.<\/p>\n I quit the varsity basketball team because it would mean missing our final Coffee House, which our Literary Magazine put on a few times per year to promote our publication and raise funds.<\/p>\n I knew who I was and what was most important to me. But there were not a lot of people like me. Later I learned there is no one like me. No one is like anyone else. We’re all our own people.<\/p>\n Literary Magazine was a safe haven for me. I was able to be with artists and writers and musicians. I was able to share parts of myself that weren’t congruent with my 6’5″ and 250 pound frame. I was able to be myself.<\/p>\n I wasn’t the person I looked like. I wasn’t the stereotype people assumed.<\/p>\n I was my own person and that was a strange beast in my home town.<\/p>\n The web was a revelation. It was a place to go outside of my high school. It was a place I could be myself.<\/p>\n The web is about ideas. The web doesn’t care who you are or what you look like.<\/strong>\u00a0The web is about information. Not appearance.<\/p>\n That’s what drew me in and why I keep going back.<\/p>\n I’m 34 now but I still feel like the same freak I was in high school.<\/p>\n I’ve never felt comfortable in my own skin. I skip around and follow wherever I see as the best path at a given time.<\/p>\n I used to feel like I knew who I was. But the deeper I look inside the less I feel I know myself.<\/p>\n But I know one thing. The friendships I’ve made online are keeping me going.<\/p>\n Some of my best friends are avatars.<\/strong>\u00a0And those avatars are wonderful people I wouldn’t know what to do without.<\/p>\n From dial-up to fiber, the web is my home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We are all afraid of being alone. We all went to the web to find out if the question we all had in our heads was true. Am I alone? Does anyone else feel like I do? Am I the only one who feels this way? No. We aren’t alone. That’s what the Internet was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4021,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New Post - Dial-up Fibers","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wrote-about"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/DTS_Photography_Movie3.jpg?fit=5611%2C3741&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4019"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4023,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4019\/revisions\/4023"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}One School<\/h3>\n
Lit Mag<\/h3>\n
The Web<\/h3>\n