Before we had kids, Jake and I used to go back to Istanbul regularly. Each time we went home, my parents would take me to a new local place and we would always run into people I knew. Always. Istanbul has over 12 million people. Yet we would run into the same people over and over again.



I was flabbergasted by this. Until, I realized, of course, that the people I knew all went to the same few places. This is always the case in a small community. People tend to go to the same places, know the same people, like the same things, and talk about the same issues. Therefore, it should not have surprised me to run into the same people everywhere I went, even in a city with a population of 12 million. It’s like a sub-culture within a big, dense city.



Yet, when the exact same thing happened lately, I failed to recognize it again. The web is even more populated than Istanbul (by quite a bit) yet it felt like everyone whose site I read knew each other. Everyone I was following on Twitter was talking about each other. It felt like I was a voyeur into someone else’s popular clique and I kept feeling like an outsider. Like the rejected girl (as I often have felt in my life.)



Until I realized that the same phenomenon that happened in Istanbul was happening here. I kept running into the same people because I found them by clicking on each other’s blogs. I followed them because one person I followed was following them, etc. Since they referred to each other often (as they are friends) I had soon built a long list of people who were already connected and built that list exactly because they were connected and then I proceeded to forget all about this and feel like an unpopular kid (those childhood feelings are hard to disappear and come back rushing very quickly).



Like Istanbul, the web has niches. In these niches some people are wildly popular even though no one has heard of them outside this relatively small niche. Yet, if you’re observing this niche, it’s really quite easy to lose perspective of it all. And to think this person is more unreachable (untouchable) than they really are. in the end, this is just a bunch of friends who all happen to have blogs, twitter accounts, etc. who are using these popular forms of communication to document and keep in touch with each other. The only difference here is that tens, thousands, millions of people get to observe this if they so choose. This creates an interesting dynamic. One that I am still thinking about and trying to see how I feel about. I am trying to remind myself that this is not me getting rejected. This is a bunch of people I don’t know sharing a piece of themselves and letting me read it.



I am not sure what my point is here, of course. Some days, I feel really sad and want to unfollow many of these people. Then I remember that I chose them cause I like their words, the way they encourage me to think and ponder. And the feeling of rejection is really just living inside me, not coming from these people. Even though I know this, it still sometimes hurts.