One Year

So...I meant to post this closer to my birthday (and by that I mean I just thought of writing this blog post like right now so grain of salt I guess?). My life has changed drastically over the last year. I am not the same person I was July 28th 2010 that I am sitting here in 2011. For example the "here" where I sit has changed quite a bit. I am now living in different city in my very own very tiny place. I owe much of the changes my life has seen to my friends and family back in Eugene without them none of this would be even remotely possible. As I sit and look back on my life I realize how much of who I am has been shaped by the circumstances of my past, both the pleasant and the really REALLY not so pleasant parts.

But there is another thing that has shaped my life dramatically in a much shorter time, and it's the one I want to talk about now. The internet. Yeah I've technically been an internet denizen since like 2005 or something, but it took me awhile to really connect to the world beyond the people I see face to face. Like I had various blogging things like Myspace and Facebook and LiveJournal, but by and large they were used to contact people within my own small community. I'd only really add and talk to people who knew me IRL. While that gave me the illusion of safety it also hemmed me in quite a bit.

And then I became unemployed in like 2009 and suddenly I had loads of time to poke around the big, dark, scary place known as The Internet. What I found in its depths whilst lurking as silently as I could was that The Internet was FILLED with people who were just like me. Some of them were shy and socially awkward, some of them were boisterous and probably have no trouble connecting with people IRL. All of them were just regular people. Sure there were the trolls and the creepy weirdos out there, but it seemed that they were no more prevalent online than they were in real life.

Which brings me to the thing that happened approximately a year ago. Around April of last year I got into my very first video game. Dragon Age. It was an awesome game made even more awesome by finding an entire community of people with common interests to talk about said game and the choices one makes therein. Now this wasn't my first brush with fandom I'd been fairly visable in the TGWTG fandom for awhile, but it was my first brush with being almost entirely comfortable being online and a part of a fandom. I started doing things like posting my fanfic (which sadly will probably never get finished) and branching out and talking to friends of my fandom friends.

Through shenanigans and joking I wound up taking a bus trip from Oregon to Texas to see Wicked on my birthday. That trip was quite frankly a disaster. Not the being in Texas part, but the getting there and back part. There were bus fires and delays and little food and sleep. The Greyhound tried to kill me twice...but through it all I learned a few things about myself. I learned that I am in fact a better judge of character than I thought I was. Both in the fact that I could trust my busmates and that I could trust the random internet stranger I had been planning to go see. I also learned that while life may throw me curve balls and things may or may not work out like I was expecting them to I can survive it. I have the ability to adjust and move forward no matter how difficult/damn near impossible the circumstances may be.

It also made one thing very clear. I couldn't live in Eugene for very much longer. I will always love the things that Eugene taught me about myself and the wonderful people I met there. They will forever have a place in my heart and Eugene will always be a place that I consider home. However it was high time that I look into getting the hell out of there.

Both of those experiences helped me find my place here in Portland. Without that trip to Texas and the epiphany I had about my life I would never have traveled to Portland to meet up with yet another random internet stranger. Said internet stranger has become one of my best friends and has been kind enough in introduce me to yet more really strange and awesome people. All of that had made moving very very far away from people that I've loved and shared my life with for a very very long time hurt just a little bit less.

So I guess this is a blog post to say thank you internet. Thank you for being the wonderful, humorous, dark, quirky, broken place that you are. Without you my life would be a vastly different and somewhat more depressing place to be. (Not that the internet is going to read this, but whatever it's the thought that counts right?)