I often find myself feeling increasingly guilty in not personally answering every tweet, comment and message that I get, but as time goes on it is not only harder because I don’t have the energy, but truly impossible to maintain a personally link to with over 35,000 people? I never thought that my life would be of any interest at all to even a handful of people, far less the number I find myself with these days. I am not stupid enough to think that every single one of those listed as friends are anything like that, many will be nothing but passing clicks and occasional re-tweet, or re-post depending which site they are on, but there is a huge number who’s avatars have become the faces of people I do call friends. Social media has opened a world that I was at first very reluctant to go anywhere near, but I would now recommend it to everyone who is housebound, as the world it creates is amazing. I have found myself now living with people spread all over the world and with people who know everything about me, but for most I know a tiny fraction about them. No one has to gather as many people as I have, it is actually quite easy to keep it at a level of people you really can call friends and have ongoing conversations with, but once my followers went past the 2000 it just exploded. I don’t know what it is about me that draws people to me, but they just keep arriving and I keep welcoming them. Somehow without ever meaning to do it, I have become some sort of guru on happiness and life, people find me inspirational, when what I started out to do was simply to highlight the truth of being housebound with a chronic illness and that neither are the end of life.

I never thought that I would find myself the center of anything and especially something that big that I would find daily that I just can’t be a polite and caring as I would like to be. I was brought up to and actually really believe, that politeness is important, so finding myself daily not able to answer or thank every single person for their message, is difficult. I guess that is the thing that I feel most bad about, but on top of that I rarely now have the time to sit and read other peoples blogs as I used to. Both Friday and Saturday for example, it took my over 5hrs just to go through everything on Twitter that had come in over night. That of course is my night, not the one belonging to everyone else, as I close Twitter down around 5pm and I don’t return to it until 7:30am, a lot happens in that time. I keep telling myself that I need to somehow develop a control system, something that means I don’t spend my life on Twitter, but then there is a problem, Social media is my life now and no matter how I have tried, I never found a way of controlling life. So to anyone who may feel that I ignore you, I promise I don’t! I ignore no one as I read everything and answer were the subject is away from what I am going to write about that day, there just aren’t enough hours in my day, or much more of me left to give daily, other than in the way I already do now.

It is amazingly strange how things in life that you always thought would have no use, no place and would contain nothing of interest, can actually be the exact opposite. If somehow I lost all contact that the web permits me to have, I honestly think now that my health would be a lot worse than it is now. For all the minuses I have found, there have also been 35,000 positives, just having the knowledge that that many people if only for a minute felt that being connected to me was a good thing, well what bigger compliment could I ask for. When you are as ill as I am, to just switch on my computer and instantly have people there to talk to if I want, or just to read what they have had to say can really lift my day. Adam can’t be with me 24/7 but the world can be and I also know they are there even when I’m not. As long as I have the ability to type, I have the ability to break out of my limitations and interact with life, I can never really be alone.

Just sitting here writing, be it on Twitter or here has the wonderful effect of distracting me from how I feel. I can’t get rid of all the symptoms, but the distraction when I am absorbed in what I am doing is a gift that I am so grateful for. I have said it so many times that I fear loosing my hands and the reason is simple, not because I couldn’t feed myself or any of the simple required actions of life, but because I wouldn’t be able to type. The less I am able to speak, I also know that typing will become an even more important gift, I just wish I could learn to speed read. Life always brings you gifts to replace the things you loose, I lost my health and found social media, I just wish it was something I could give to so many more. There has to be at least 100 friends for everyone, if not more.