mama believer

Today I found one of my old blogs on Livejournal. Livejournal was the popular blogging tool before Wordpress or Blogger or Tumblr. I was on there for years - often changing blog names with every major new chapter in my life. I made some incredible friends on there.

I read through a lot of my old posts - which began sometime around the time I found out I was pregnant with C. Some were good. Some were bad. I absolutely loved seeing all the old pictures I had posted and forgotten about. There's some seriously cute ones of H on there.

One major observation while reading through it was that I am nothing like that person anymore. It's amazing the changes I've gone through even since getting pregnant with C. Our family life has changed so much! That being said, I also read through a lot of struggles that we had. I believe a lot of the struggles and changes we went through as a family has a lot to do with the change in me.

I often wonder what happened to a lot of the people I knew from Livejournal. Some of us had such tight friendships. It's really amazing to me how something like the Internet is holding us all together - and for that matter, ripping us all apart. Most people won't take the time to write snail mail. People will barely even email anything anymore thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. If you're not friending each other there, it seems so many friendships will just fade away.

I miss my life before social networking. I miss the effort that went into friendships. I miss knowing there was someone out there who would take the time to find out how you're doing rather than wait for your status updates.

Although I've made great friends through blogging, in a weird way, I think sites like Facebook have destroyed some of my friendships. We didn't always know everything about each other. We didn't have to. And I don't always want to know everything about everyone. Blogs take time to express the things you want to say - the important stuff. You only really found out what they really wanted you to know. There is a sense of importance in what people write when they have the ability to use more than 140 characters. Social networking seems to bring out stuff that someone wouldn't ordinarily say if they had to write several paragraphs about it. Most people (myself included, probably) tend to update about every feeling they have toward every event that happens in their day - even if it's just the fact that they are bored or tired. I don't need to know how someone reacts to every thing that happens in their day. As much as I hate it, it's a bandwagon I'm too scared to get off of right now. That being said, social networking is like having a few hundred unwanted roommates. And as I have learned from experience, sometimes we're better friends than roommates.

I just like the important stuff.