Escaping Online

I went looking through the website of the denomination I grew up in recently. I wanted to know what they had to say to people like me. The answer, in short, was very little. But it did have a link to an off-site blog post about how offline people might understand us. Mostly, it’s very “how do you do, fellow kids”, but it got one thing right: online people are looking for a place of honesty, a place of vulnerability, a place of truth.

To live online is to be on the record at all times. I cannot stress enough how different this is from the offline world. It is, in many respects, hellish. It is said that the Internet forgets everything except what you want forgotten. Everything we say, all the time, can and will be used against us.

But this also offers an opportunity to be a better person. Everything we say can be used for self-reflection and improvement. Every embarrassment, every behavioral pattern, can be seen and reviewed, so we have to learn to change the parts of ourselves that are harmful and own the things that aren’t. This can create anxiety, but it can also help alleviate it. If I know that I can say something before the whole of the Internet, I must then be able to say it in person. That is what I have been doing on this blog for the last year and a half.

But there is another reason we go online: we do it to escape you, our elders.

Believe that God is infallible and omniscient or don’t. It doesn’t really matter, because humans, and the institutions we create, never are. There is always a crack to slip through. Even if you leave the 99 to find the one every single time (and you won’t), there will be times when you are blind to the problem right in front of your eyes. You can’t hear the Unspeakable. You mean well, so you try and you try, and it just makes it worse. Because all it does is highlight your cacophonous deafness.

It’s painful to be around people we can’t share our problems with, so we go where we can avoid the pain. We go where we can share what’s in our minds, with people who are able to listen. We go away, and we only come back to visit.

I don’t want it to end there. I want to say there’s something to be done, something that actually heals the relationship. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know how to speak the Unspeakable. I’ve tried. God and the Internet know I’ve tried.