When People You Only Know Online Have Bad Stuff Happen

I never know what to say. I have all these people I don’t really know in person, but I ‘know’ them from Tumblr or Twitter, and when something bad happens, I feel like a weirdo, because “I am so sorry,” seems so inadequate, doesn’t it?

I mean, it feels like nothing because we have so little inflection online. You can’t do an emoticon, it just seems weird, you can’t write long responses because you don’t know the person well enough and it seems intrusive…

Anyway, I always feel awkward and end up just mumbling, “I am so sorry” for their loss, and I feel it must be very poor comfort indeed.

Until I was on the other end. When I lost my dogs this year, and when we had the break in last week (this has been one rough year in a lot of ways), a bunch of people, hundreds, actually, wrote and said things similar to, “I am so sorry,” and man, I am really surprised at how much that meant to me.

When a bunch of people are kind enough to try to convey that they feel bad something crappy happened to you, it means something. It doesn’t MATTER what the words are, so much, it still translates as, “I am thinking of you, and hoping things get better.”

So I would say, don’t feel awkward. Maybe we aren’t writing poetry when we tell someone we feel bad for a bad thing that happened to them.

But the real message still comes through.