People that love where they live? What does that feel like?
I have this tendency when people gush about how amazing a place is to over blow the place I’m living (or visiting) or to tear down that place.
“I just love Seattle, I couldn’t live anywhere else!”
“Ugh, but the traffic is terrible, it rains all the time. I could do without it.”
“Finally, I get to go to Scotland! I’ve dreamed of it all my life.”
“You know what’s amazing? Seattle! All that culture and it’s basically the same climate…”
The thing is, I’ve never felt a powerful connection with a place. A location. Not in a positive-it-completes-me sort of way. Now don’t get me wrong, places have given meaning to my life. I will site my birth town as being the Hellmouth, like from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I will joke that to get anywhere from the town I mostly grew up in you had to drive twenty minutes just to get to the freeway to drive twenty minutes to get anywhere.
But probably I’ve forgotten more things about these places than I’ll ever count as influences on my life. And I’ll never feel like I belonged there. Any other place would be just as much a place as that place.
But since I was nine years old I have felt I’ve had a place online.
Now the Internet isn’t a physical place. It’s a concept and a community that requires a physical item to access it, but it lacks it’s own physicality. Yet I can trace my journey of places that I belonged and defined me.
There was Dark Mark, the Harry Potter fanfiction forum. Then I moved on to hexrpg, which was a Harry Potter rpg website but I mostly was there for the non-HP stuff. From there I moved to Mugglenet which found my a home in Marauder era rpg. When that place became unaccommodating to our group, we started building out own. I have a series of friend made websites that became my Places though, if I’m honest, they were more or less the same Place.
When one of those last Places got wiped out by an ex friend, I was devastated. Not only did I lose a lot of irreplaceable writing but I lost a Place. I lost a community and the feeling of safety and identity that sphere of the Internet had given me.
I spent a year rudderless and Place-less. My anxiety and depression saw me at my worst. I stopped being able to write at all.
Eventually I would find a new place online but I have found myself trying not to tie so much of my identity to it. I’ve put up barriers against the places the internet provide to keep myself from being hurt in the same way.
Yet here I am, waist deep into Twitter. Here I am with a blog once again. Here I am role playing with a new group of people that are precious to me. Here I am: writing.
Recently, I moved to another state. Before the move, our friends who already lived here did everything in their power to make me fall in love with the place. I smiled and played along but when asked about it later all I could say “Well, it’s a place. And it’s not a bad place to be.”
I’m constantly asked since I moved how I’m “enjoying” the place. If I like it. If I’m glad I moved.
And honestly, all I can really do in response is shrug and say “It’s a place.”
Ask me about my Internet Places, however, and I don’t think I’d be able to contain the excitement.
Sisona Writes 