When Blogging Changed My Life

Today's post comes courtesy of Tabitha. As part of her Blogoversary giveaway, I'm submitting my entry for the Starbucks gift card (my favorite prize of the bunch! ;-) ) with this blog post.

Her prompt reads:

Tell me about a time when blogging changed your life.
Now, rather than talk about *a* single instance, this blog shall be a twofold post:

Chapter 1 -- Making Friends

Let's see... I started blogging in 2004, writing a few posts on Tripod.com but mainly focusing on using Tripod's blog features to keep a baby diary for Todd, who was born that year. Serious blogging didn't really come onto the scene until 2005, when community/gaming site Grab.com, of which I was an active member at the time, came out with blog features. By then, I'd started making friends on Grab. The majority of my current blog subscribers, in fact, are people I met from Grab. They are folks of all ages, from all walks of life, and from all over the globe. When I started blogging, the community spilled over from the forums onto my blog. It wasn't unusual to see the comments section take on a life of their own, sometimes veering completely away from the original subject matter.

Anyway, it was here that I started to bloom socially. I'd always been an introvert, and still am. Online, I found myself interacting with people and socializing in ways that I never would offline. Blogging gave me a creative outlet and a sort of "personal" forum on which to hang out with my friends. I enjoyed writing, and I enjoyed the ensuing camaraderie. I even wound up meeting some of these online friends, from night out in Hollywood in a limo to a 4th of July BBQ in Salem, OR to Chicago O'Hare Airport to cloudy and rainy Wales to visiting the Grab HQ in Washington.

Before that, even, we all got together one New Year's Eve, plugged in our computer mics, and had some raucous fun with a Yahoo voice chat NYE party! Now THAT took some planning, considering everyone was in different timezones-- from Eastern Time in Michigan to early morning in the UK to... well, already well into the next DAY in Australia.

So yes, my social life was improving, even if it was in front of a computer. I met people I would never have otherwise met, and enjoyed learning new things about them.
In fact, I've never been a big fan of the terms "IRL" or "real life friends". Makes it sound like my online friends aren't my "real" friends. Nothing could be further from the truth. These folks aren't any less real than the people I can physically hear and see. That's why I prefer the term "offline" friends, to distinguish the medium through which we interact, rather than assign any labels to the supposed level of reality this friendships are. You could say blogging changed my life in that respect.

But probably my most amazing life-changing story comes not directly from blogging itself, but from one of the friendships forged through the social networking/blog site I started on.

Chapter 2 -- One such friend becomes a lifesaver

A while back, my marriage fell on rocky times. My husband and I seemed to be at an impasse, and then the turning point came unexpectedly: one of my online friends, “Callie”, suddenly wrote to me out of the blue describing her own marriage problems. Suddenly I found myself “counseling” her, writing words of comfort and advice that I know could not have come from my own head. I had no idea where these words and ideas were coming from-- I have absolutely no background in this sort of thing! And throughout the course of this “counseling”, I realized I was being a hypocrite, and that I should be applying the things I was telling her to my own marriage. Once I did, things began to improve. Our marriage is better than it ever was.

Another effect of my conversations with Callie is of a more spiritual nature. I was born and raised agnostic, and when it came to matters of God, I was still on the fence. My interaction with Callie (among other things that I'll save for some other post) left no doubt in my mind that God exists and that his hand was at work with us. First there was the matter of being able to give her advice. Where was it coming from? I am convinced it was inspired by God and I feel as if I caught a brief glimpse into what it must've been like for the divinely-guided Bible writers in their day. I just put my fingers to the keyboard and they practically went on autopilot. Second, there was Callie's point of view-- she later told me she had no idea why she picked me, a distant friend, to confide in-- she just felt guided to write to me. Apparently God had things to tell her AND me simultaneously. Since then, not only have our marriages greatly improved, but our spiritual lives have been recharged, as well.

If it weren't for Grab/blogging, I would never have met Callie (even though I have not, to this day, met her face to face). I am glad I did, for, as they say, the rest is history!