Blessing or Curse?
Every month at least two friends or “friends,” those acquaintances or colleagues or cousins you barely know who are all lumped in together with your besties and partners and kids on Facebook, go missing or dark. They’re “taking a break” or they’ve “deleted the app” or some other means of temporarily separating themselves from the deluge of news rants and selfies and kid (furry or not) pictures.
Mental health experts and mindfulness/wellness gurus alike recommend taking breaks from social media and indeed Twitter and Reddit and the like can be toxic places. They can also be blessings. Like old school chat rooms, LiveJournal, MySpace, etc., social media can be a haven for people who feel different or left out in their real life surroundings.
Until the Internet, I’d been led to believe my passion, okay obsession, with pens and paper and other stationery supplies was “weird.” I grew up in a fairly small town where most kids preferred the toy section of stores to the back-to-school aisle and who didn’t steal their parents’ office supply catalogs. Don’t get me wrong. As a little kid, I liked toys plenty and did my share of circling stuff in the Sears catalog. (I’m old. This was a thing back then in the time after A Christmas Story and the Internet as we know it. Think of it as an analog Amazon Wish List.)
By middle school, though, I was absconding with the Quill catalogs from my mother’s office. (Man, those things had everything. Pens, reams of copy paper, file cabinets, white boards! White boards! Note: this was back when most classrooms still had chalkboards.) And before that I’d discovered the art supply section of the local office supply store downtown. Suddenly Crayola just wasn’t cutting it because they had Prismacolor in a dizzying array of shades.
Generation X, as I knew them, was not known for their oversized pen cases or writing notebook after notebook full of terrible stories as much for the process of writing as for the glorious texture the pen left behind on the spent pages. I knew of no one else in my school who got a desk-style tape dispenser for a birthday — and was thrilled about it. (Note: I still have it and it’s in the art studio, but I recently replaced it on my desk with a mint green version that my husband had no idea was a thing one could be giddy about.)
Finding out I wasn’t alone was a relief. Finding other people who also have not just one fountain pen but several was like finding out I wasn’t an alien species after all. It’s amazing how we can internalize our “weirdness” until we realize there are other “weirdos” out there.
Finding others like you can be disheartening, too. When you’ve gone too long feeling alone and outsider, it can feel tempting to try to match every aspect of life or try too hard to “fit in” with your new fellow weirdos. I touched on this before, because sometimes finding out you only sort-of match up with a tribe of niche-loving geeks can make you feel even more alone than you felt when it was just the mainstream that didn’t “get” you.
Thing is, we’re all different and we all have degrees and depths to our passions. We shouldn’t crap on others for not being as into a thing as we are nor should we beat ourselves up for finding out other people are even more obsessed than we are. (This goes for comics, film series, book genres, software packages, code languages, sports, and even washi tape.)
We also have to not crap on people for being more obsessed than we are, which can be tempting if we’ve spent too much time tamping down our enthusiasm to fit it. (Unless they’re calling you a fake geek for not knowing which Pantone color Spiderman’s right foot was on page 3 of issue 12. Then, feel free to call them a raging Dickasaur.)
So, yes, be your own dork. Don’t crap on other’s dorkitude. But still, take breaks every now and then from social media to re-engage with your weirdness on your own terms, without the influence of others, so you remember why it is you were geeking out about it in the first place and you don’t get caught up in other people’s bull.
Hey, look, it’s the end! You made it. Maybe that deserves a clap or two? Maybe you’d like to share? Comment? Hug yourself and remember why you love you? Buy a mint green tape dispenser? All of the above? Aw, you shouldn’t have.
Peace.
