The last six years of my life.
I used to live in a supportive apartment in Milwaukee that had its own community built into the building. Farwell. I lived on the second floor, but anyone from the building could go to ground floor and associate themselves with anyone from the building. The whole building was designed for the mentally ill, and chances are, if you talked to someone from that building they had similar issues as my own. Many days I would make my cup of coffee from my apartment and then walk downstairs and chat with many people from the building, or the staff that worked there from OurSpace. I knew half of the people from that building because of this, and would spend more time in other people's apartments than my own.
When I moved to Greenbrook all of that changed. Neighbors here know each other but not in the same way as my first building. Sometimes I talk to people passing by but they aren't my friends. There is a community room downstairs but it's almost never open, especially after COVID hit. My neighbor is looking into the possibility of it being re-opened, but sometimes it takes Greenbrook awhile to enact new policies and procedures. Thus for the last six years while living here I decided to make online friends instead, and have a digital kinship to my two emotionally closest friends, Dan and Hayley. We talk every day in fact.
Would I prefer to have real-life friends, like in Farwell? Of course I would. But Farwell was filled with drug addicts, and if I reapply and move back to that building, chances are I'd get an apartment too small for me anyways. Farwell had a lot of advantages, not just the community room and its location on the east side of Milwaukee. But I am already so used to Greenbrook and I feel more comfortable here, and chatting with Dan and Hayley, than I ever had been living with people with chronic mental illness and the drug abusers. And overall I am much safer in a suburb of Milwaukee than I did when I lived on the east side.
When I moved into Greenbrook I made a conscious decision at that point that I would look for community online rather than force it in real life. It may not be the same and it might not feel as real as talking to someone next to me, but it works. I might be alone most of the time but I almost never feel lonely, not in the same way I did in Farwell before they finished renovating the building, before they added the community areas.
I'm content with what I have and I'm glad I met otherwise would be strangers into my life. The best part about it is because Dan and Hayley are online friends, no matter where I live, their chats will always come with me. So, unless I end the friendships myself, they’re permanent, unlike the Farwell friends I had before.
