Blogging Amongst Real People

For the first time, I watched 84 Charing Cross Road and oh! Loved and learned from it and even felt a little freer afterward. Truly.

In case you haven't a clue about 84 Charing Cross Road, it was a true story, one which took place over 20 years (1949 - 1970). Letters were exchanged between workers at a London book shop (the coziest, most perfect one, ever) and the New York author, Helene Hanff. How they all became parts of each others' lives through the written word and gifts air-mailed over the ocean. These people became close friends, not in-person, but through an exchange of words of compassion, gratitude, a love of books, humor and a need to connect with other living, like-minded souls.

It reminded me of this thing we do. This blogging thing.

It's funny the newspaper articles and tv reports about blogging which blast us bloggers. Downright smirking at us from smug smiles, they say that, in Real Life, we are lonely souls who have settled for a second-best way of communicating with others. Others who (get this)are not even Real People so can never be real friends. 

There's more, but I don't wish to type more of it into my blog.

So. If I am not communicating with Real People, then with whom am I communicating? Unreal People? Half-way Real People? Outer Space People?

Since I was 13, I've been a letter-writer. My family moved from town to town, always leaving good friends behind. So--what? Because I chose to write letters to my friends after arriving in my new town, did these people suddenly become Unreal? Was I under a delusion that these folks had, when I left, suddenly entered a sort of misty Unreal World just because they no longer lived next door to me? 

All human beings who sit at a computer keyboard are Real People, be they tellers of tales or truth. 

Even if they sit three-thousand miles away from me, still they have hearts, souls, minds. Still they are Real. I am so not the center of the Universe whereas the closer you stand to me, the more real you are--stand farther away and you are but a hazy, filmy figure.

Yet isn't that what these blog-spoilers are proclaiming? Aren't they saying that real, heart-felt communication happens only in-person, but never through the written word? (And of course, that conjures up pictures of dusty love letters tied with ribbon up in attics and those which were gathered into books. Well, what about those?)

And what I've discovered since age 13 while letter writing? Many people share who they really are and feel only when they write, not while someone stares at them in-person. They feel more free to express themselves over the written word (and well, you can add me to that list). Er hem.

Maybe the folks writing that we bloggers are delusional and the controllers, those who would be king. Haters of change. Naysayers. Perhaps they're like those teachers in high school who told us, "While in MY class, things will be done MY way only." (Their narrow, I-don't-care-what-the-textbook-says way.)

And I'll be brave and state they are those who cannot simply be happy for us. Happy because, we had to search for our kindred spirits online because we found none nextdoor or at our jobs, etc.

So to the clueless ones I say simply, I am sorry you don't get it. And I'm sorry you're missing-out on this whole new world, this in-between world, in which the rest of us are having a blast.


******


"What is Real?," asked the rabbit one day...

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
....From The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams