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    <title>"we're all connected", said lain, with wires dripping down her body - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios</title>
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<b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
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  <p><b>"we're all connected," said lain, with wires dripping down her body</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 12-12-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Friends are a bit of an anomaly in my brain. An unexpected wrench in the gears, if you will. I can easily deal with people disliking me, usually after I've broken some unspoken social rule that I didn't know about, since it happens so often that I've grown used to it. But the concept of someone coming along and actually <em>liking</em> what I do, and then deciding to freely associate with me and even call me their <em>friend</em>- something in my brain short-circuits.</p>

<p><em>Someone</em>'s got to be making up bullshit. Maybe they want something out of me, and so they're trying to butter me up and make me more pliable? Or maybe they're actually collecting &quot;receipts&quot; on me and just attempting to fly under the radar so I won't suspect that they're making a callout post about everything wrong I've ever done in my life.</p>

<p>An unhealthy suspicion of everyone who treats me kindly on the internet is, well, <em>unhealthy</em>, but it's saved my skin from more situations than I can count. If it hadn't been for extensively using Tor and Whonix during the Lucine saga, shit could have hit the fan so much harder than it did, and I probably owe my life to such anonymizing technologies. I don't want to leave a trace where I go, because that means there's contingencies when shit hits the fan on whatever platform I'm currently using and I need to leave at a moment's notice. There's people who'll be concerned about my mental health and whereabouts and people who'll be confused and sad and might think I &quot;ghosted&quot; them, perhaps for nefarious reasons.</p>

<p>But yet... every person wants friends. Every person wants people they can trust, people they can depend on, people they can turn to in catastrophe.</p>

<p>Every person wants to be liked by <em>someone.</em></p>

<p>I have some friends on <a href="https://ilovela.in">my home fediverse instance</a>. >@tA, @lunarised, @NotAnElfie, @vala, and a handful others that are rarely active enough for me to catch them on the federated timeline. At least, I would consider them friends by any conventional definition- we get along, and we voluntarily associate with each other, and we haven't had any major arguments yet. We congratulate each other when things go right, and console each other when things go wrong. And maybe we don't all share the same interests- I know absolute shit about Bionicles, and I doubt anyone really understands when I go off the deep end and start posting incoherently about Smash lore- but nobody, at least to my knowledge, ever feels like they're annoying anyone when they infodump about what they love.</p>
<p>We're <a href="https://regularflolloping.com/posts/chippies/">chippies</a>. We watch out for our friends. We appreciate our friends for who they are, instead of who we wish they could be, or who we thought they were in a past life. It's a lopsided home, but it's a home nonetheless, and one we're damn proud of.</p>
<p>It's an awesome community, and I'm grateful as all hell that, out of all the instances I could have jumped to after I fled Tumblr, I somehow ended up on Layer 13.</p>

<p>And yet... something's still missing. Something's not quite clicking right in my brain.</p>

<p>What is it?</p>

<p>Maybe I'm just overly paranoid. Maybe the people who harassed me off Neocities were right- maybe I do need to seek therapy. But then again, trust comes into play- my parents, meaning well, could pay for a therapist, but then how would I know that the therapist wouldn't just snitch on everything I say to my parents? Especially since I come from a conservative Christian background, even though I'm almost the complete opposite of how I was raised in terms of identity- if I need to talk about, say, overhearing my grandma ranting about gender-neutral bathrooms behind my back, then I might be safer with my internet friends than with a meatspace person with the authority to fuck my life up in a matter of seconds.</p>

<p>Or maybe it's the lack of physical touch inherent with internet relationships. Like Lain sitting in her room full of computers, bleary-eyed late into the night, I still haven't fully adjusted to being immersed in the Wired instead of just a passer-by, or a surface user. Baptized in the code, reborn as fully me instead of just a digital representation of me.</p>

<p>Lain would know how to connect to others, right?</p>

<p>I've noticed a few positive changes in my life ever since I joined Layer 13. I've been writing more, for instance, since my friends are <a href="https://regularflolloping.com/atom.xml">also</a> <a href="http://lunarised.com/blog/">blog-writers</a>. Not &quot;bloggers&quot;, since that makes us sound like we're a bunch of white women with perfect teeth blogging about drinking natural bottled water and jogging while chasing trends and trying to gain as many Clout Points(tm) as possible on the main WordPress instance. And I've repaired my relationship with Lain, realizing her as a conduit for improving myself and a symbol of hope instead of despair and technological death like back in June. I've realized a sudden love for drawing, as well.</p>

<p>I do love my friends. And even if I succumb to paranoia in the end- which I highly doubt I will- I don't think I'll be able to stay away for long.</p>

<p>We're all connected.</p>

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