You’ve got to be careful. You think it’s so great to work from home but you never see anyone. The only way you relate to co workers is on sometimes very complicated phone calls. You can’t see anyone’s face but often you can hear their frustration. Or worse yet silence until you prod them to please speak up. I’m not saying it’s always that way, but too often it is.
Then you get onto Facebook to see what your “friends” are doing, but they’re pretty much just playing games like Farmville or the garden one and you’re not interested. Old friends (people who really used to be friends) find you here and “friend” you, but it all peters out because they’re in their life and you’re in yours and you live far away and even if you don’t it all feels so disconnected.
Some of your co-workers friend you on Facebook, so now you feel weird posting anything relevant to your life because if they didn’t think you were weird before, they will now. So you stop posting on Facebook altogether.
Your family isn’t much help. The ones that are still talking to you are pretty busy and besides so are you so you don’t talk much. Except to Mom, thank god for Mom. If it weren’t for Mom, you’d never know what the rest of the family was even doing, not that it’s great hearing about your poor nephew getting arrested again, but still.
Then you think you’re the only one who has these feelings. To make matters worse your best feline friend up and dies on you. You do your best to communicate with her on the other side but it’s just not the same as being there. When you’re feeling really isolated and alone she’s not there anymore to remind you how much you’re loved.
So on and on it goes. This post is tongue in cheek, of course, but take heed, for isolation is lurking about wanting to eat you up whole bones and all and no one will ever know the difference or wonder where you went.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Lis Sowerbutts // Dec 16, 2009 at 12:16 am
Very true – the isolation thing took me a while to get used to – but I love it now – but then I was always fairly much a loner anyways! I’m about to move back to a town I know a lot of people in so it will easier than it has been in a place where I knew very few people. I must say if I didn’t have a partner I would have had to make a much bigger effort to connect to people – which is tough because there really is a “real world” social group for people who work on the Internet – might have to start one!
.-= Lis Sowerbutts´s last blog ..Passive Income Goals 2010 =-.
2 Cheryl // Dec 17, 2009 at 8:21 pm
Thanks for your insights, Lis, I’m not sure I want to get used to it, although I think in may ways I already am. I like it some days, but I live in a very large city where I used to have lots of friends. It’s been many years… And, I’m with you, if I didn’t have a partner, I’d truly be alone. Or maybe I’d make more of an effort to go out and meet people. Probably the latter. Isn’t Facebook the “real world”? Ha ha. Totally jaded. BTW, I love how your blog looks these days.