A short while ago while reading a friend's post I saw a name of a person I knew, she was a cousin of mine that I vaguely remembered. I sent a friend request and she accepted. Well today she sent me a message on facebook, she had apparently seen my link to my blog that I posted on my facebook wall and she came over to read. She read and read and read for 3 hours straight! She sent me a message to tell me how proud of me she was for being a survivor and for speaking up. She saw similarities in our personalities and our choices and she seemed to feel inspired by my words. 2 hours later she is still reading my blog and getting to know me through my words. She actually had thought I was a weird kid.....well I was so I don't hold that against her, but at least now she knows why. The best part about facebook, she's not the only person who has read my blog from my link and then sent me a message about how I had touched them with my words.
I had another friend, about a month or so ago (might have been even longer I am terrible that way lol) send me a message to say that she had read my blog and realized how blind she was to the people around her in high school. Obviously she came from a good family where mom and dad loved one another and their children and she didn't realize this sort of thing happened or just didn't want to know because she was a teenager and she really didn't need to know. She was always nice to me and always had a smile on her face. She always greeted me kindly and I truly appreciated that. She didn't know it, but she helped me get through high school just by being the nice kind person she naturally is.
This is why I write my blog and it's why I decided to periodically link it to my facebook wall, so that others who thought they knew me could understand that weird kid, even if it wasn't me that they knew back then. See, the way I see it is if anyone reads my blog then maybe they will remember some weird kid from school and think "Wow this sounds like Joe Schmo" and maybe then they will think twice before they judge that shy weird person, maybe then they will think twice about how they see others around them. Maybe they will realize that they were wrong to judge that person as weird and they will think twice before they think that way again. There is usually a reason for people acting the way they do and quite often it boils down to the life you started with and in some cases it's the life you have now. Perhaps that shy woman in the next cubicle that doesn't join in on work parties is belittled and treated poorly by her husband to the point that she has no self esteem left. Perhaps she was abused as a child and simply can't move forward for fear of what might happen because bad things have always happened when she reached out. Perhaps it's both and you just don't know it because she puts on that fake smile everyday, stays to herself as much as possible and tries to stay under the radar.
Why do I love facebook? It's simple, it's because I feel I have made a difference in other peoples lives because of it and I have managed to connect with a cousin who realized her life, although it sucked, wasn't quite as bad as it could have been. Now she has someone she can talk to when she's having a bad day, now she won't feel so alone because she followed a link from my wall.
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