My Apology to the Internet

While I'm in the middle of a long health crisis, I just want to say to something to this 'audience' of friends.

In the early years here on facebook, before we truly understood the impact of social media on our psyches, I was a particularly loud purveyor of rancor and I don't think I've ever truly apologized for it.

On the one hand, you can't really regret your life except for your most extreme sins. We all lived through the same events and forces, and we are all, in our way, the markers of the times we lived in. Social media is the closest record of what it was like to live through any historical period, but because the record was so tantalizingly easy to write down, it changed our personalities. If you already had a lot of anger, if you'd lived a troubled life, the temptation to splay your anger around the internet was irresistible. The fact that the temptation was irresistible is amply born out by the fact that so many millions yielded to it.

The point of the internet, what makes the internet great rather than terrible, is that it gives a place to express yourself at your best, your most uplifting, your most enthusiastic, not your worst. But when you feel like your best is ignored, it is so unbelievably easy for the worse angels of our nature to emerge. And for those of us who've showed our darker selves in public, the penance is that we have to show our struggles to control it publicly, with the knowledge that we will fail all too often and that every time, we have to own up to that side of who we are, with both realism that that side will sometimes emerge, and also with the promise to ourselves that we'll strive to do better even as we know that some people will write us off along the way.

I am a lonely guy. 41 years old, a life of little romance, no marriage or children, almost all my good friends live far away, with too much brain malady for more than a cursory job, armed with a battalion of physical ailments, learning disabilities that prevented education in the subjects that interested me, and interests so unique to me that there is barely any contemporary I may discuss them with. I live with all too many memories of actions of which I feel deeply guilty, many of which may well be the coinage of a feverishly delusional mind. The temptation to view the world misanthropically is overwhelming. But it is not the people who hate life who are most vulnerable to hate, it is the people who love life vulnerable to it, because when life doesn't love them back, it's a colossal blow.

If I end up consistently posting here for another thirty or fifty years, it's bad enough that my epitaph will be 'he had a good facebook page and he went to Cats.' Whether I think other people have been unfair, nobody wants to be remembered as a troll. I want to give more solace than disturbance. I want more to comfort the afflicted than afflict the comfortable. I want my presence on the internet to be remembered more with fondness than exasperation.

Some of you weren't there for the worst of it. Some of you may think you were there for the worst of it and got a mere pebble in the pool compared to what all this was ten years ago. Whatever my qualms about others, those don't matter. That's between them and their creator. We're only responsible for ourselves.

So if I do serious posts around here, I'll do my best to stay positive. I'm going to keep failing a lot, but once your 'out there,' you can't change your reputation by keeping quiet.

Wish me luck.