Can’t Go Home Again
Man, I really miss having an online home. Don’t get me wrong, tumblr is pretty damn close to my fondest base, but when I was younger and on deviantART, I was like... a local. People would know who I was. People would recognise my icon and chat away to me, and I don’t mean in a “omg, internet celebrity!” way, but in a “I belong to a small town community and everyone knows everyone” way. We’d draw each other’s characters; I’d participate in seasonal activities and contests; I’d write weekly journals and engage as much as humanly possible with watchers/followers.
But the internet has gotten so vast and there are so many places to go and time and attention is spread so thin that I don’t feel like I’m... part of anywhere. I upload to tumblr, deviantART, furaffinity, weasyl (sometimes), facebook, reddit, instagram, and probably a few other places I can’t even remember, but It’s always in a drop-brief hello-gone way because it takes so long to even upload, and I have a regular job and a small social life and general boring ass regular adult offline chores, and I’m so god damn overwhelmed and I don’t feel connected to any of them in the way that I once did. I don’t know what the solution is. I don’t even know what my problem is. The internet just feels so different and I’m missing when I felt like I belonged a bit more, and I don’t know whether that’s an age thing or the internet on the whole, but it feels more like the latter (excluding the fact that I’ve a lot more in the realm of responsibilities that comes with being a grown up)
