The First Step To Recovery...

…is to admit you have a problem!  Or so they say! My name is Penny…and I love to chat. Since beginning the process of living on my own almost four years ago now, I discovered I would have a lot of time…empty time…alone time…that would need to be filled. So, with limited resources and a keen curiosity, I set out to discover the world of instant messaging, chat rooms, email, and the wealth of information that is at your fingertips….just a click away, on the information highway a.k.a the World Wide Web or internet. If you’re a user/friend on my Yahoo Messenger list, you’ll see a tiny tiara next to my name. It means I’m signed in…a lot. It means I know how to use the features of Yahoo Messenger, and that I do so on an extremely regular basis. That tiny crown goes to the top 5% of Yahoo Messenger users…and I wear it proudly! I type in pink, whether I am on I M, or in a chat room. I look for nunaces in writing. Different styles, forms. I use emoticons…because they’re just so cute!

One of the few people to remain on my Yahoo Messenger list since the beginning, is a guy I met in a chat room on MySpace about four years ago. Yep…they had them, but they’re now defunct. He coined the phrase “Intimate Strangers” for how we tend to see our relationships in the online world. We’re intimate…because we choose to interact with one or more specific groups of people on a regular basis…be it hourly, daily, weekly, etc. Yet…we remain strangers, most often never even hearing the actual voice of the folks we call friends. We become invested in their real lives, yet with a lot of them, we’d never know it was them if they were sitting in a booth next to us in our favorite restaurant. We tease, cajole, get crushes, get rebuffed, get hurt, flirt, make a general nuisance of ourselves…all in an effort to form some sort of community, so we do not feel as alone as we know we are once we’ve turned off the piece of plastic that helped us ‘meet’ these people. My chatting has led me to where I am today. The roommate I live with, I met…(you guessed it!)…chatting.