It’s day 4 of my personal challenge to blog the daily gratitude prompts from The Optimistic Muse, and today’s prompt is:
I’m so grateful to have met…
I’ve been lucky to meet some incredible people in my life. There are the usual suspects, obviously my family, and my husband. I’m grateful to have met my son, but if we talk about that, it makes you consider why I might not have met my son, and that gets pretty morbid quickly. So we’ll move on from that before it gets sad.
If I started talking about my friends, the list would get pretty huge – I’ve got some pretty kick ass people in my village, so to speak. So, I’ve decided to focus on some online friendships I’ve made in pretty unique and unusual ways.
The first person I met on the internet
The first time I used the internet, I was at my sister’s house, on her computer. She introduced me to mIRC, and chat channels (which, omg, still exist). Full of young bravado, I set my nickname to “megababe” and started chatting away.
Folks, my generation is the reason why there are so many rules and regulations. We’re the ones who tested the boundaries and demonstrated what not to do.
On that day, I befriended someone pretty quickly. We chatted about wrestling, of all things, as my friends down the road and I had been watching a lot of WWE. I’d been drawn to him on the channel initially because I recognised his nickname was the name of a wrestler. When it was time to leave my sister’s house, I sent him my address so that we could become pen pals.
Hint for everyone out there using the internet – do not ever give out your address to strangers.
Luckily for me, H turned out not to be creepy at all. And in fact, in his first letter to me, he scolded me for giving him my address in the first place. Then he promptly told me more about himself, his family, and provided his own address, so that I could write back. (It just occurred to me that he was also writing to a stranger at the time, and effectively did the same thing I did, just on paper!)
Nearly 30 years later, we’re still friends. We’ve met in person once for a music concert, and that was it. Still internet friends, still message each other on our birthdays, and still have the odd joke about our nicknames.
Definitely grateful to have met H – who can say they’re still friends with the first person they ever met on the internet?
The glory days of Twitter
In 2008, I joined Twitter.
Back then, it was full of people sharing interesting things about their day and finding people who shared common interests. It was a positive place, not like the shitty place it’s become since you-know-who took over and renamed it.
One of my favourite memories was the day I live-tweeted the movements of a spider in my office. Another time, I started folding little “cube dude” figures out of paper while I was in meetings, and posted pictures of them. I amused myself greatly when I posted “Mr Invisible”, which was literally nothing. And laughed at those who clicked to view it, and replied with varying levels of ridiculousness.
When I split with an ex, I was going through a period where I questioned who my friends were. We had been together for so long, and my self-esteem was so low that I just assumed that all my friends would disown me and align with him. (Fun fact, we were all quite mature about it and still share friends to this day.)
On a whim, I decided to post that I was going for dinner at a particular location, on a specific date and time, if anyone wanted to join me.
Anyone sensing a theme here? I clearly have no regard for my own safety. And I call myself a true crime fan…
On that night, I was lucky enough to meet another incredible group of people. T, L, B, K, and S. We talked about a lot of things, and in fact, I think that might have even been the first year I wrote a 52-in-52 list! On the list was to go to a Pub Trivia night, so we all decided we would meet up the following week. And thus we became friends, and a trivia team, for a long time.
To this day, I still consider B and K amongst my closest friends. Since then, some of us have moved interstate, some of us have stayed at home. But we still regularly catch up, and in fact, they were who I turned to for my board game night for this year’s 52! As for T, L, and S, we’re still Facebook friends, and I’ve caught up with L a few times for some nerdy WordPress things (he’s a whiz at it).
This group of people were instrumental in rebuilding my confidence at a time when I really needed friends.
My virtual run club friends
In late 2018, I was reading some posts on the Running Mums Australia Facebook group. One person mentioned a virtual run club, split up into 4 houses, that competed with each other in regular competitions throughout the year. I loved a team sport, and was keen to know more.
I learned it was Harry Potter themed, and although I knew of the wizarding world, I hadn’t read the books or seen the movies. Yet I completed the online quiz, got sorted into Ravenclaw, and signed up.
(I will now defend Ravenclaws to the death.)
I’m not part of the Run Club anymore, and there are a lot of reasons for that but they’re all unbloggables. I don’t wish to be sued.
But I was lucky enough to make some amazing friends through that experience.
One in Japan, T, who I talk to almost daily and have her entirely to blame for my obsession with planners, stickers, and washi tape.
The rest are all scattered around America, and one is in the UK. In fact, one of them, Kim, is the one who just visited recently, with the holiday recaps I’m still writing.
In 2024, I travelled to America and got to meet most of them. There were a couple who weren’t able to join us, but the majority of us got together for a running event in Arkansas. I’m still trying to put together the video from that trip – another 52 goal for this year.
This trip is one of the highlights of my entire life. Keeping up the trend with no regard for my safety, I travelled internationally to spend nearly 2 weeks with people I’d met online. I joked it was either going to end up as a great adventure or a Netflix murder documentary.
Spoiler – there was no murder.
When we try to describe that trip now, we explain it was like meeting your best friends for the first time.
These people are so important to me to this very day. We pick each other up when we’re down, we cheer on our wins, and we encourage each other to keep going.
These people match my crazy, and I love them so much for it.
Is there someone that you met in a weird and unusual way? Who are you grateful to have met in your life?
