Huck & Nick talk about stuff.
“I thought I made a mistake once. But I was mistaken.” That’s a joke I heard once. I can’t remember where I heard it. But it came to mind when I was thinking about writing today’s blog. Today’s blog is about communication, and as someone with a BA in Communication Studies from Dublin City University, I feel I have acquired some expertise in this area. Welcome to Monday, by the way. Let’s talk about my recent annoyance with social media.
As someone born in 1995, I have had life experiences before and after social media and instant messaging became big things. Like most people these days, I love to hate it. Social media is great in many ways. Stop me if you’ve heard these reasons before. It’s great for things like this blog and getting it into the world. It’s great for entertainment with the likes of YouTube. It’s also great for communicating with people. I text my friends through social media all the time. Friends you’ve heard of before like Kurt, Fred, Billie and Nick too. Nick and I didn’t message for a while. I won’t go into the weeds, but I will mention a few things from my side.
In the past 12 months or so, I have slowly been brought back to reality. I had some growing up to do and some personal goals I wanted to focus on. This came at a price, however. I had to be less social than I usually would be and say no to many things for practical reasons. I hated doing this and felt like I was regressing massively. But unfortunately, I knew it was necessary for a while. It felt like I was building myself back up again after taking a few steps back. I was figuring a lot of stuff out and didn’t talk about it too much. When I was finally ready to “get back on the horse”, so to speak, the landscape changed unexpectedly.
I started reaching out to people I hadn’t spoken to for a while to pick up where we left off and start making more of an effort again. Then, Nick disappeared. I jumped to a lot of conclusions. My most significant assumption was that he grew tired of me. I didn’t blame him. It was a shame. I thought we would eventually bump into each other, and I could explain myself. That did happen, eventually. Nick reemerged, and we started texting again. But, as the premise of this blog would suggest, it wasn’t the best form of communication. I again jumped to conclusions and thought Nick was even more upset than before. I was only half right.
We met at a wrestling show recently and spoke in person for the first time in nearly half a year. He told me about some personal struggles he was going through at the same time as I was, and suddenly, everything made sense. It turns out that his tone in the texts was not what I thought. Who would have thought that, for the most part, the best way to communicate with others is in person?
Instant messaging can be great, but it has its faults, too. I hope that I have better and more frequent in-person conversations going forward. Thank you, Nick. Thank you for reading, and thank you for your time.
