Here I sit at an early Halloween party.  It’s loud.  There’s lots of activity going on, and I’m sitting alone in the family room working on my blog.  My friends are very understanding and indulgent of my weirdness.  They’ve brought me drink, and soon I know that at least one snack will appear.  I truly love these people.

I really thought when I joined the cyber world that I’d become the ‘wonder woman’ I always knew myself to be inside.  Instead, I’ve found I’m trying to do here what I always seemed to be doing in the ‘real world’, I’m jumping through hoops to either get people to like me or to keep people who’ve already joined the infamous ‘Friend List’ to keep liking me. Really! I don’t mean to disappoint anyone!  There’s my problem in a nutshell.  The point is, why do I even care?

The crazy thing is, my needy behavior is actually worse here than in my offline life. Why?  How did I get so caught up in wanting people to like me here, when in the real world, I’m not nearly as obsessed with that.  Actually, in the real world, I’ve given up.  In the ‘real world’, there are so many people and so many varied circumstances, it doesn’t matter if I’m my ‘real’ self or not.  Nobody really cares.  They’ve already made their judgements, and 99% of them can kiss my arse!

Although I spend most of my time alone, for the most part, I’m not lonely.  I will admit to missing a significant other in my life, but that’s something else on which I’ve given up.  I was never meant to be ‘normal’, never meant to have a lot of friends or be the life of the party, nor was I ever meant to be married with children.  In my efforts to deal with the disappointment of the latter, I’ve created a small farm with a bunch of critters.  More critters are planned for the future.

Why am I saying all of this?  What brought on this upchucking of my innards?  A person on my ‘Friend List’ who is struggling with not being able to be herself…that’s what.    Honestly, that pisses me off!  She’s a good person who has issues in real life with which she struggles, and it’s not fair that she can’t be herself in a cyber world where no one actually meets anyone else.  Who gives a fat rat’s arse if someone can’t handle being dropped from some stranger’s ‘Friend List’?  I saw an example of what she fears a few weeks ago.  She was going to drop quite a few people from her Friend List so that she could handle the pressure she was feeling by dealing with only the few she trusted.  One of the people on her list attacked her in a snotty way wanting to know if she was in danger of being dropped.  Of course, the natural reaction of the woman being attacked was to want to close her page.  Well, I ripped that nasty female a new one, she was dropped and blocked by my friend, and my friend kept her page.  The irony was, that woman was in no danger of being dropped.  Until her uncalled for tantrum, she had been one who was safe from being deleted.

Now it’s Monday morning.  I’ve taken care of my critters in the rain, and I felt nothing but contentment with them and fruit for my breakfast,  I re-read what I had written on Saturday night, and I’m aggravated all over again.  Ultimately, my friend will have to deal with this in her own way, but I’ve come to a conclusion of my own.  If we haven’t spoken since I added someone to my ‘Friend List’ that person can go.  I’m going to post that I am accepting no more “Friends”  If I do accept someone, it will be someone with information I need in order to grow as a person and to grow in my chosen Path.

Bullying, like what happened to my friend, must stop!  I have no illusions that it will stop because of this blog, but maybe it’ll get some folks thinking about why their “Friend List” is so huge and they speak only to about three or four people on it.  I mean really!  If you would simply walk away from such people in your real life offline, why would you put up with them in cyber space?