I'm the opposite. I crave emotional connection and I feel that I have been spoiled on it- Papa Internet is more like a drug dealer who has me hooked and needy.

There once was a girl who was my pen pal, we wrote to each other dark fears, crushes, troubles with parents, etc. When she started to go to my high school, we decided to go from letters to a leather diary. Every few days I would go to my locker and find the diary with a fresh new entry inside of it, and then I'd spend a few days writing my own entry to it. We spilled ourselves into this back and forth relationship. We did this for years, and I eventually realized that this was the way I enjoyed listening to others and expressing myself in the world- long form, open, intimacy.

Today, I've built up a group of close friends who I have the ability to talk incredibly intimately with about anything. Over the years, MSN, Gaia, Myspace, and Messenger were avenues for sharing diaries with people I found genuinely interesting. You could set the length of entries and match your partner's. You could take your time to ruminate someone's problems. You could take the conversation a wild new direction without making it seem like an interruption. The long form is my preferred form of intimacy.

And then I extended it out- forums, Reddit, hell, even here on hubski, I have no qualms sharing the thoughts that knock around the insides of my brain with Papa Internet. But there's a catch with Papa Internet- it's an unbalanced relationship. The problem is that there is so many people hidden with Papa, and after skimming so many paragraphs, the mind is skewed to think- Ok, it's my turn now. All I want to do is talk about my own day. All I want to do is talk about my own problems.

Something terrible has happened recently- someone told me over Messenger that it was like I was talking at them, rather than talking with them. No one has ever told me this before, in my 12 years on the internet, sharing public diaries with others. Have I changed? Worse- have I remained the same in a different world?