At the Philly cohost wake a former something awful user whose lets plays I watched as a teenager showed up and I didn't even know he was on cohost this entire time until now and he gave me a vegan cupcake so that was very nice it was delicious.
It was so funny because I had this very very brief moment of being a little star struck but then immediately realized he's just another nerd like me and were basically the same age now that we are aged >30 which is different from when I was a teenager and he was a college student (waow!)
When I was in college I was a really big fan of a local musician, and she was a very slightly older trans woman who was only a degree removed from me socially so I would see her a lot at parties but I'd be so awkward and star struck that I would struggle to talk around her. She even started greeting me by name and I'd still get nervous like I was talking to a celebrity. We ended up being cohost mutuals and finally I got over myself and saw her as a regular person who makes cool art I admire but is still more or less like me.
I was really nervous about the cohost wake because I know that I'd become a celebrity on here due to my status as one of the first users. I was worried about living up to expectations people might have of me or that people would have odd parasocial expectations I couldn't meet
I kept thinking that I was very socially awkward and talking too much... but also everyone there knew who I was and how long winded I am in my posting so like... what did they expect... but still... I was worried I wasn't doing a good job facilitating socializing and people having meaningful moments.
Everyone who came was very autistic. A lot of people barely spoke or forgot to say who they were on cohost so we had no ways of knowing if we knew each other already. We were just a bunch of nerds introducing ourselves with normal offline names. The park was perfectly sized in that it was very small and there was not many of us.
Kaz became just a regular person to me, who exists offline and is not anything beyond me. Alyssa was finally a regular person to me. And I think I became a regular person to myself as well. Nobody treated me with celebrity reverence. I actually just felt like a normal person participating in the group. There wasn't pressure to say something wise. The only emotional moment I tried to create was at the end before I left to get dinner I played the Curious Quail compost6 song with all the cohost memes and sang along to it awkwardly. Any illusion of me being a "cool person" must have been shattered at that point.
Twitter had given me an inflated sense of ego about how important posting was and this felt like the final cohost moment of humbling myself. Everyone was just a person on here.
It was kind of funny how it seemed like nobody knew each other from cohost except people who already knew each other offline without cohost. I was expecting a lot of "oh my gd you're so and so! We're mutuals!!" And instead it was like, people who apparently were prominent on here who I never even encountered until I met them in person.
After I left with @numberonebug we went to the grocery store and got some chicken and Brussels spouts and made dinner at her place and just chatted about life. We are just people. It felt so very normal. Like we were in a 90s sitcom and not living in the age of the collective internet unconscious neural network wiring our thoughts together all the time.
SEPTA unreliable as always got me home later than some of the people who traveled from outside of Philly even though I live here. I had a headache and laid down. I got into bed and fell asleep at 8pm and woke up at midnight. I was not trying to go to sleep that early. Now I can't sleep of course. Tomorrow I have some doctors appointments and need to start preparing for my promotion and saying goodbye to my current library assignment. Cohost and my time at this branch aligned very closely. A lot of bittersweetness. But there will be many adventures in the future.
I hope I didn't disappoint anyone today! I am just a regular person in my 30s. I spend most of my time working. I have an interesting job I guess. But now a select group have met me and can confirm that I am just as socially awkward as everyone else on here. I speak strangely and often ramble incoherently and I rock when I sit and all those little things that make me human.
On Tuesday cohost shuts down. On Wednesday I go to Baltimore for Rosh Hashanah. On Saturday I am working overtime to run a bilingual poetry reading. On Sunday I am going to watch taskmaster with @micolithe if their husband doesn't have anything contagious. That weekend it's back down to Baltimore for Yom Kippur. After that on Tuesday I'll be meeting up with jklol.net who is an alum of my Alma mater who has been a great influence on me giving me sage life advice and helping encourage me to be chill and normal about stuff and not get caught up in grandiose philosophy all the time. That weekend I have an overtime shift running an event that's a part of wrapping up my current big work project before I have to move on from it for new projects. Then I have a TTRPG campaign with @jackiedoesinternet and @hrhrflwrs
My goal for the Philly wake was for people to realize their online friends had lived near them all along. In the end I realized a lot of my online cohost friends are already my offline friends. I already regularly have plans to hang out with them even if I cancel half the time due to disability. We are all just regular people.
When Cohost shuts down I won't be losing a special celebrity aura that makes me less of who i am. The aura was always an illusion. I've been a regular person this entire time. Kaz was always just some gamer making videos. Alyssa was always just some girl with a guitar. Kim Kardashian is just some lady with money.
When cohost shuts down I won't be losing as much of the community as I thought, because indeed this city is already full of friends who had this experience with me. I have already been friends with them.
The internet connects us, and we are already real.
Cohost got us to give each other good faith, but we were always capable of being kind patient good faith people all along and can keep doing it in the future.
Cohost got me to take my writing more seriously but I always could have been doing that and can still do that.
Cohost got us to be less concerned with being famous and accumulating numbers.... but none of us have ever been the rich and famous. We were regular real normal people all along. Cohost merely didn't have the illusion that we had been anything else. The illusion was an active illusion created by other websites, but not an innate part of us.
In the coming year, I'm not going to be an internet microceleb with a social media following anymore. I won't know how many readers my blog has. I'm just going to be a person. I'm just going to go to work and hang out with friends. Shel will just be short for my real name. A nickname my friends use. I won't be a brand anymore. (Shocking twist that Shel is literally just a diminutive of my normal-ass real name.)
I did it. I've weened myself off social media. I'm free.
