Retroversy

I must admit I’m not particularly thrilled about the collapse of Twitter.

Atrocious as it was, that site did expose me to different perspectives, to news, to insights I never would have come up on my own. I’ve always been convinced that other people can phrase their thoughts in a more coherent matter than I am, and I’m honestly kind of scared to go out there without having this curated selection of people I trust and know to be kind and wise and generally right about things providing me with information and opinions that matter to me.

Nevertheless, I can’t say using Twitter was particularly satisfying to me from a social perspective. Too often it gave me the feeling that I was trying to strike up conversation with a wall of solid concrete, that my stories, my opinions and my creative efforts weren’t interesting or valuable enough, or that I deserved to receive help when I needed it.

I don’t blame others for this feeling of being denied a satisfying social media experience. I’m awkward and constantly expect the things I want and need to spontaneously occur to me, instead of actively searching them out. I have spent far too much of my life — in the words of Thom Yorke — “waiting for something to happen”.

This is something I want to change, because I can feel my world becoming smaller. Moving out of my parents’ home a year ago made me realize they were my tether to the outside world, and choosing to significantly reduce my presence in their immediate circle has essentially chopped my entire social network to pieces. I spent the period of your life you normally spend building your social circle violently rejecting the idea that I had relationship needs to begin with. I should have listened to Maslow.

By the time I realized I needed affection and validation from people other than my direct relatives, it was essentially already too late. Building new meaningful relationships after college is hard, and more worryingly, not something you see very often. Here I was, having never learned how to reach out and actively pursue whatever it is I want or need, because everything I did, from going to the movies over inviting people to visiting other countries, I did at initiative of my parents. I could not imagine doing things on my own, let alone having a circle of my own, separate from theirs. The only way I knew how to build a life for myself, was to just be, and hope for meaningful experiences and connections to spontaneously manifest.

When my mother passed away not soon after, my bubble shrank yet again. I started to realize that the people I have will not be there forever, and that if I want more of them in my life, I’m going to have to reach out.

Moving to a fledgling new social network, one built on positivity and earnestness, seems like a great opportunity. But I still don’t know how to avoid that feeling I’ve had for years on Twitter; the feeling that I’m screaming into the void, that I’m standing on the other side of the window, contorting myself into all kinds of positions to draw the attention of the people having a good time inside.

Eventually, I can’t help but ask: How do you form a community? How do you find people who share your values and interests? How do you reach out to them? How do you make people care about you?

In other words, how do you build a social network?