Reflections: My Life With The Internet

A writer's work is never done. Sometimes even when it is done, you have to go back and do it again. With seven days to go, I am now down to just under 200 articles left to migrate. I've started to wonder if I really want to continue to go through the trouble.

There have been changes at Helium prior to this very big one, including shifting everything over to a new site (that was fun), re-categorizing of existing articles, title changes... in the shift away from first person, some pieces were shuffled around to the prose section under the heading "Beyond Prose."

Prior to this, those opinion oriented pieces were a quick means of boosting your score as you could submit an article to a title that had several articles already and quickly rise to the top 25%. Now that none of that matters anymore, reflective pieces such as "How I see Myself in the Mirror," and "How I Relax: My Favorite Hobbies," just seem irrelevant.

There is one title though I think that is more interesting to me today than it was when I cranked it out November of 2009. It's a reflection on using the internet, though when it was migrated to the new site some genius put it under memoirs. When I think back on my first experiences with the internet and compare those to how I use it today, it seems they are light years apart.

Technology has become such a huge part of our everyday lives that it is almost invasive. It crosses over into just about everything we do and we are now a planet of gadget junkies wirelessly connected at all times. I'm happy to say that nine years post K I have now reached a point where I can feel comfortable shutting my phones down at night.

My relationship with the internet has changed significantly just in the short time between now and when I first submitted the article shared below. Just a few short decades ago, this was all the stuff of science fiction, and now it's increasingly becoming the norm. As much as I resisted both Facebook and Twitter, social media marketing has become a huge part of my regular routine, and what on earth would I do without Pinterest?

Memoirs How I use the Internet

At the time I first ventured onto the internet I didn't know very much about it let alone the potential of what it could be used for. I had seen journalists in movies and on television accessing some kind of massive computer library of information and I assumed the internet functioned much like that.

When I first discovered the internet I did not have access to it at my home, or even my own internet ready computer, for that matter. I think I first learned about it through a friend whose husband did some kind of work. They had internet service in their home and she was always on it, usually visiting the chat rooms. It was an outlet for her because at the time she was a stay at home mom.

A short time later I started out using the internet at my mother's house and in the beginning I would visit chat rooms and occasionally look up information. There was not nearly the amount of online resources then as there are today, but it was new and fun and because I had my own screen name on my mom's AOL account I was able to receive email.

Once I started to learn how to navigate around the Internet Super Highway I also learned how to download and save documents for future reference. The best thing about it was that when you wanted to do research you could do it at any hour of the day, unlike visiting the local library. Back then it was all via dial up service using your home telephone.

When I was able to start accessing the internet from home I would spend hours on it looking up all sorts of information on how to do things. At times I would not have the budget to go out and buy books and the internet was a valuable twenty-four hour resource for learning new information from a variety of sources I would not have been able to access otherwise.

Over the years I have gotten away from visiting the chat rooms. I ventured into the sphere of online dating briefly without success and I delved into some of the early social networking sites. I visited online game rooms and did a little shopping. During the time I didn't have a car being able to shop online made a huge difference in my ability to get the things that I needed.

At one point time I spent a lot of time on email reward programs like My Points and Bonus Mail (which are now merged into one program) as well as a couple of programs that no longer exist like Freeride. Those programs made a significant impact in my getting to go out during periods when I wasn't working via the gift cards and movie passes I earned.

Today a lot of things have changed. Now I mainly use the internet for email correspondence and I still spend quite a lot of time researching information. I occasionally play games and do a little shopping and I am the organizer for a meetup group. Recently I have been spending more and more time with passive income writing sites and I am trying to carve out some time to develop my blogs. I check my email multiple times per day and just I can not imagine my life without the internet.

How Writing Contributes to Healing

Everything that happens in life whether directly to us, to someone close to us, or in the environment around us, has an impact. Some effects are obvious, while others are more subtle and take longer to surface. There are a number of things we carry with us, though we are not always conscious of our baggage.

Some of us function seemingly fine in spite of our baggage, and some have trouble managing the ups and downs of daily life. Getting help is sometimes difficult, especially when money for counseling or therapy is not part of the budget.

Humans are terribly resilient, and while therapy may be necessary for some, other can get by with self-help and/or centering techniques such as exercise, meditation, and reflective writing.

Reflective Writing and Healing

Healing from a loss or disappointment or some other kind of setback takes time. The key to moving forward from grief or other internal pain is in developing an awareness of it so it ceases to be quite as painful. One means of getting to this point is writing. From simple journal or even letter writing that gets your feelings out to the more focused approach of reflective writing, developing increased self awareness helps to put things in perspective so that they are less difficult to deal with.

Writing helps you get all the facts in order at times when you need to make a decision about what to do next. It lets you examine a situation from all sides looking at the pros and cons so you can determine what is best for you. If you have lost a job or a relationship or a loved one, writing about the experience helps clear your head to start over again with new purpose.

Keeping a journal is simple enough. You record your thoughts and feelings and it can sometimes have the cathartic effect of confronting someone who has hurt you but without the drama of an actual confrontation. You can sort things out and decide what you should or shouldn't say or if it's even necessary to say anything at all.

Speaking of confrontation, letter writing is a very affective means of getting everything out of your system without having to be face to face with the person you are writing to. Even if the person who has harmed you is deceased you can still gain closure from writing a letter telling them exactly how what they did made you feel. This is actually better than confronting someone face to face over an emotional issue. When you confront someone without the assistance of a trained therapist, things can backfire and you may end up with the situation being worse.

Reflective Writing as a tool is an invaluable resource that everyone should utilize. Writing reflectively triggers memory, sparks creativity, and develops mindfulness. It can be viewed as similar to responsive essay writing in school where you were given something to read and then told to write a reaction to it. You can use quotes, photographs, or objects to spark your writing and explore your feelings. One very effective exercise is to write a letter to a problem.

By exploring the thing that causes you pain through writing you effectively take the sting out. Learning to look at a situation from another perspective not only eases discord, it provides a path to creative solutions and problem solving.

The Dance

When I decided to start this blog it seemed to take forever to carve out some time to get it going, but
the most difficult thing was coming up with something to name it.  Every time I thought I had found just the right title, it was not available.  This went on for weeks until I was starting to think that it isn't just all of the good band names that are taken.

Time passed, adversity reared and again I revisited the idea of this blog, still unable to find a working title that didn't seem trite or corny or too much of a cliche.  This time I was looking for a phrase or a concept that could personify my vision and reflect the overall goal for the blog and what I hoped it would evolve into.  I tried so many different phrases and variations on variations.  Finally today I stumbled upon a quote by Mikhail Baryshnikov that summed it all up for me: "I do not try to dance better than anyone else.  I only try to dance better than myself."

Of course this is only part of the story.  I received a message today from a Helium writer, Ganelle Davis, saying hello, responding to something I'd said in my last message to her and asking me to take a look at her latest article  "How to be a blessing to others."  I didn't want to put off reading the article because I knew time would pass and it would get pushed way down on my list of things to do so I decided to go straight to it.

I first "met" Ganelle via email when she set a message me thanking me for a craft article I did on "How to make a bible cover."  To me it had just been another empty Helium title that needed filling and so I filled it.  But to Ganelle, it was something else, something she connected to and made her feel compelled to tell me about it.

She began her note by telling me how much she had enjoyed reading my article and went on to tell me a little about herself.  She closed with the words: "May god continue to bless you, just as your writing has been a blessing to me."  It's not everyday you write something that evokes that kind of response, especially not something that would seem as unassuming as a craft article on making a bible cover.

She sent me another note a few weeks later, but I was out of the country and the message got buried.  We've corresponded a few times more since but it was today's message and the reading of her article on "How to be a blessing..." that compelled me today to finally come up with a name for my blog and get busy posting.

I decided to look for quotes that might inspire me and started with those about adversity since that seems to be the prevailing theme in life that brings us all back to where we started again and again and again.  After several pages of great quotes (see http://thinkexist.com/quotations/adversity/) I had several saved to my account with the "add to chapter" feature (registration is free!) but I hadn't found anything that really spoke to me and could help me in my quest to finally name my blog.

It was then that I noticed in the lower right margin of the page there was a little box with suggested quotes by topic and decided to click the link to the motivational ones.  It was there that I found the quote from Baryshnikov, one of the greatest dancers to ever take the stage.  ( I still remember the scene in White Nights where he cons Gregory Hines out of some money by doing all those successive pirouettes.)

The quote, "I do not try to dance better than anyone else.  I only try to dance better than myself," is perfect for me both as a former dance student and as someone who wants to be her best possible self and it is the perfect starting point for this blog which aims to address some of the issues faced on the path of being one's best self.

So as I close this initial post I would like to say thanks, Ganelle.  Today you were my blessing.  

By the way, that is me dancing at the Rock and Bowl last summer in the photo above.  I had only gone to listen (my other half is behind the drums way in the background) and was wearing these clunky platform shoes that I had to take off to be able to dance.  Swing dancing is not my forte and I do it so infrequently that I always have to be reminded of how to do it.  Good thing all social partner dances have basic patterns in common!