My White Warrior,

Paradox [par-uh-doks]:

1. The Internet is the information super-highway, and yet it limits sociality in so many ways. We are connected to our friends (from school, from work) more closely than we ever have been in the past: with a click of a button, we can peer, like voyeurs, into their lives, and they, the exhibitionists, display all for us to see. Communication has been expedited in a hundred big and small ways. And yet, don't you ever feel that you are more isolated from them than you once were?

When the only means of communication was the Pony Express, people went months without hearing from the loved ones they'd left on the other side of the country. Now, if we go a few days without anyone sending us an email, and IM, commenting on our blog, texting us, writing on our "wall," we feel forgotten and utterly alone.

2. And then there are the sites dedicated to connecting strangers via their mutual interests, desires, needs. This should expand our sense of social connectedness to the breaking point, make us feel more belonging and satisfaction than we can handle. Instead, connecting with these people makes us feel more like deviants, like outcasts: we shouldn't be using these channels to find acceptance and love.


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What entrances me about our dialogues is that they feel less like dialogues and more like thought. Not in a jumbled, or nonsensical, or stream-of-consciousness way (although sometimes that may be so). More in the way that they are so absorbing, and so subtle, and so comfortable, that it's easy to slip into them without realizing it, easy to forget that we ever began them, and likewise that they will ever end.

You recognize this, no? You know the kind of conversations with self that I mean--we introverts thrive on them. One moment, you're diligently pounding away on whatever task you've been told to do, changing the format on a thousand references, double-checking APA sites on unusual sources, inserting missing periods and commas between and after authors when suddenly you're musing about how cliche your thought-spoken experience of depression seems to be: "Sinking into despair," standing in the midst of "Waves of sadness," "Drowning in the waters of self-loathing." You're trying now to come up with an expression of your experience that isn't quite so trite, so overused by would-be poets and adolescent bloggers. The best you can come up with is "the icy grip of rumination, clutching tenaciously at your throat until your lungs have forgotten the sweet sensation of unburdened breath." It seems a little convoluted to you, and not quite the sentiment you were going for. Your failure is disappointing, and you wonder if there will ever be a time when you will be able to use your melancholy as a creative catalyst--it seems to you that you did at one time. You recall the folder of a thousand creative endeavors, started and forgotten, and think that maybe you should return to them at some future date, perhaps when your life isn't so squandered on menial tasks, and that thought

wakes you up. You hadn't even realized that you'd slipped into yourself. You look at the screen, and see that your fingers had continued on without you, looking up style tips, adding periods and commas.

Those are our dialogues--though usually less depressing than stimulating, less dark than illuminating, and less trite than novel, and endlessly valuable.

~Fair Maiden