We Interrupt This Meme to Bring You the Message that Andrea Totally Rocks

Over time, as I've become more and more involved in the blogging community, I feel I have gotten to know so many amazing people so well despite having never met them in person. At times I have felt I've begun to form honest-to-goodness friendships with people I've never once met face-to-face-- in some cases, with people whose photographs I've never seen, who have never even told me their real names.

Since having a child, the unavoidable changes in my lifestyle have meant that I have grown apart from so many of the real-life friends I once had, who had been mostly young, single, and childless, the relationships that had depended on weekly face-to-face interaction and common experience slowly fading as I found myself unable to attend spontaneous last-minute gatherings, or answer midnight calls. And finding new friends, which has always been a difficult challenge for me as a natural introvert, has at times has felt nigh impossible now that so little of my time feels like my own. When I began blogging, I was beginning to feel desperately lonely.

Connecting with others, especially other mothers and fathers, online, finding so many people with lives and thoughts and feelings so similar to my own, has helped so much with the loneliness, isolation, confusion, and sheer inadequacy I often felt as a new parent. Blogging, in so many ways, has kept me from losing what's left of my mind.

But I still miss my old in-person friendships. At times, I have wondered whether this world I have built for myself online is really nothing more than a comforting illusion, a band-aid solution to my social problems. Was I wasting my time, forming virtual relationships, instead of trying to find "real" friends?

I have found myself wishing, often, almost daily, that some of the people I know online could come over for dinner or go out for a drink in real life.

But the idea of actually meeting a fellow blogger I'd come to think of as a friend in person also made me very nervous.

After all, we all sound so much smarter, and funnier, and kinder online, with the aid of the delete button.

What if it turned out we didn't get along in person? What if I ruined a blog friendship by failing to meet the expectations of someone I'd only ever shown my most thought-out thoughts, my best side, to?

I met Andrea, from Little Bald Doctors, today. And as I have suspected since the first time I read one of her blog entries, she totally rocks.

I just found out she's already written this amazing blog entry about us meeting, and I'm speechless. Because seriously people, she makes me sound so much more awesome than I actually am. I am such a major geek. And she makes me sound, like, totally suave, but I was just as nervous about meeting her as she was about meeting me.

But Andrea has an openness about her that is completely disarming, and she is just as witty and interesting in person as she is on her blog, and before we'd talked for an hour, I felt like I'd known her for years. Which was a weird feeling to process, because, despite knowing all sorts of details about her daily life from having read about it online for months, I'd only just met her in person.

And, gosh darn it, I think she might actually like me. EVEN WITHOUT MY DELETE BUTTON.