The internet has made it easier than ever before to form and maintain long distance relationships. Social Networking sites like LiveJournal and Facebook make it easy to meet new friends, and quantify our real life friends into lists, networks, communities and numbers.

Relationships are fragile things, and the internet can harm them quite easily. I am not the only person to fly off the handle in response to a careless blog post or email from a friend. Its easy to be an arsehole to text on a screen.

When you’re Facebook friendslist is simply a list of every person you have ever met, even if it was just for a day, or an hour… unfriending your best friend is gonna gut them. They aren’t going to take it well, trust me. When your LiveJournal is one of your few tangible connections to someone, unfriending them is going to be noticed, and its going to hurt them.

Think a little about it. Don’t unfriend someone just for a fight. If you don’t want them to have access to your LJ while you cool down from a fight, create a custom group, but for gods sake, don’t unfriend too easily.
If someone is an arsehole online, and you’ve never met them, block block block! But if there is a real life relationship that is being maintained in large part through social networks, for gods sake, be careful when you are blocking someone. Don’t do it out of anger.

To be frank, I have had enough of being unfriended. Of being rejected, hurt, blocked, ignored. Its happened to me too many times this year. I’ve not always been in the right, but I’ve usually thought ‘Its ok, we’ll both cool down, I’ll contact them, we’ll talk and then everything will be ok.’
Its upsetting when I realise they’ve blocked my IM, unfriended my LJ, unfriended me on Facebook, and spring cleaned me right on out of their virtual (and by extension real) life.

Since I started coming out as Ryan… every step, not just as trans, but right from the beginning, at the end of 2006, when I decided to be me instead of someone else, I’ve been rejected left right and centre.
I know I’ve had growing pains. I’ve said, and done stupid things. I’ve hurt peoples feelings. I’ve been going through the emotional growth and maturing process that most people get 5 years in highschool to experience, in less than 2 years.

I’m hurting. I am hurting because so many of my good, close, friends… friends who I honestly thought would always be there for me no matter what, think I have gone too far this time. That they can’t be my friend anymore. I don’t know their motives. I don’t know if I’m too queer, too radical, too trans, too political, too argumentative, too arrogant… could be any of those, or something else entirely. I didn’t call often enough. I’m too busy, their feelings are hurt cos I didn’t visit them when I said I would.
I don’t know.
All I know is that when I reached for them, they weren’t their anymore. They said we moved too far apart. We have nothing in common anymore.

Its not just my friends. Its my family too. My biological family and my church family.

And I can’t take it anymore. I can’t sit around and let the rejection come, over and over and over.