My Experience: Social Isolation, Using the Internet to try and help it, and getting into trouble for it.

I hope I don't get into trouble for writing this.

When I look at my empty email inboxes I can't help but feel extra lonely, and even extra disliked.  When I'm in this kind of mood, which happens often.  I feel like I need to write something.  I need to tell a sad story for my past.

I spent years on the internet.  Starting in 2002 trying to make and keep friendships.  I have always been vulnerable to whoever would talk to me.  Often times I would come across teenagers that were willing to talk to me.  In the early days, I was in my early 20's and it didn't seem to matter that much.  I reasoned, this is not ideal for me, but at least it is better than nothing.  As the years went by I began to learn that this is becoming dangerous for me.

When I used to go to public chatrooms, dating sites, social networking sites, and forums.  I wasn't looking for teenagers.  I just wanted someone who would talk to me.  Occasionally I would meet  someone older than me, and we would talk.  But no matter the age, nothing lasted longer than a year at best.  At worse the chat might last one session.

As I looked over my life and how it must appear to others online.  I started to realize that I look like a creep.  Creepy because of my 2nd shift custodian job.  Creepy because I live with my parents.  Now I look creepy because of my age.  I even had someone think I'm creepy because of my hobby of flying and building R/C Planes.

You might be wondering "how did you get into trouble?"  It didn't happen very often but the few times it did, scared me.  I got reported.  One time I got reported, I told the moderator, I didn't do anything wrong.  They could see that I didn't do anything wrong, but they advised me not to talk to teenagers anyways.  But I wasn't looking for that.  They often times were the only ones who was willing to chat.  Even here one of the listeners told me how young they were, I told them that I didn't feel comfortable talking to them.  I got nothing against you, but I've been falsely reported in the past and I can't trust anyone under the age of 18.  I prefer people are around 30.  Because for a 20 year old everyone has got plenty of time to work on themselves.  But for us older people.  I'm 45 now, it feels more and more like time is running out.

On Dating sites people expect to date.  That is ok, but on the dating sites I was on, I wasn't able to meet anyone that was local enough to go on a date with.  So I eventually stopped trying that.

For the sake of protecting myself online, I even deleted all my selfies.  If you asked me for a picture right now, I would need to get out the camera and try to take a picture.  I'm not a good looker, so I don't like doing that.  When I was in my 20's I didn't look that good either, but I wasn't afraid to kid around in my photos.  I took a picture of me wearing a clean mop.  Just to be different.  I created a picture of me tossing a mountain dew bottle mid air at the camera, just to be different.  I took a picture of me wearing blue rag, just be different.  I even made a kaleidoscope picture of myself for my fb page. (I never felt like I could just make a normal picture of myself since I'm not very photogenic.)  But as I began to feel more and more disliked, and got falsely reported 3 times.  And I had an online g/f, that was a stupid thing to do!  After an online breakup she wrote a 2 1/2 slander blog against me on myspace.  4 years later she apologized to me and took it down.  What I'm saying is I've been through some bad stuff online, and now I'm scared to be posting pictures of myself etc.