Who Knew Strangers Online Could Offer Me This
It was a pleasant surprise
To be completely honest, I have always found that when I choose to embark on a new adventure or path, some of my supposed “close friends” never truly supported me or had my back.
The perfect example of this was when I decided to travel solo.
It was my first ever solo trip, well at the time it was actually my first time alone on a flight ever.
Before I left I was lucky to have the support of my family and a few good friends, but my best friend seemed to only want to impart the fear of God in me.
She would tell me how she didn’t think I would even last a few weeks and that I would hate it and be home before I knew it.
I tried to ignore this and pass it off as her meaning well, but when I actually look back on our friendship this always seemed to be the case.
When I got a new exciting job, she was the only one who didn’t seem too thrilled about it, when I was dating a good guy she would do everything in her power to insult him.
I now know that her words were not filled with good intent, but rather to deter me from chasing my goals.
It’s safe to say now years later we are no longer friends but this taught me a valuable lesson which was that sometimes there will be those around us who genuinely don’t have our backs and are not happy to celebrate our wins.
Identifying the saboteurs
Sometimes it can be tough to identify these people because not everyone who counters your success or ideas has bad intentions, some want to warn you of pitfalls for your own good.
Not everyone has this mindset though.
From personal experience, I have found that it can be the people closest to us that act as our biggest saboteurs all in the name of looking out for our best interests.
That’s not to say that everyone close to me was like this but there were a few like my ex-best friend for example who I realised in hindsight were always in competition with me.
Having competitiveness in any relationship isn’t healthy and can actually be detrimental to both parties even if you are the type of person to not engage in these games.
Unlikely support
I found that when I wanted to put myself out there and try something new, it was strangers who seemed to offer me the most support.
While social media does have its many downsides, there are positives that have come from it too, one of them being the connections we are able to make with complete strangers.
It's hard to make deep connections with people online, but one of the great things about social media is that we can sift through the masses and seek out things that interest us and find others who share the same common ground.
That’s how I noticed the support that strangers offered.
Look at Medium, for example, we don’t really know anyone on here, we just connect by the words we read, and when we find something we resonate with, we form a connection with that writer.
It is so heartwarming when I see such supportive comments on my articles knowing that these people don’t know me offline, yet still show support as if they do.
In this sense, building a community online can be a great thing as we connect with others based on how much we resonate with their craft.
That is one thing that feels genuine about connections we do make online because we aren’t basing it on a person's personality or our relationship with them, we just know them through their artistic expression and that is how we connect.
Connections come in different shapes and sizes, and sometimes we find them in places we would have never expected, but it is always a pleasant surprise when we do stumble across them.
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