Group therapy in a blog.
“Making Space” (Jewish Week)
Many of today’s college and post-college-age young adults are involved in an online community called MySpace. When you register, you are given a homepage, which you decorate yourself: You design it, decide what biographical information to include in the profile, what kind of music or video will greet page visitors and put up as many pictures of yourself or other people in your life as you want. And although you can invite other people into your network, it’s still not called “OurSpace† you choose your affiliations, but ultimately the profile belongs solely and completely to one individual: you.
In some ways, MySpace inherits a solid literary legacy, with subtle flavors of both Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own†and Emily Dickinson’s soul that “selects its own society.†The message of both concepts is that to find yourself  whether it’s your truth or your art  you have to experience solitude. To exist in a place apart from others enables you to define yourself in a relative vacuum instead of in a biased social or familial context. And so, online communities provide young adults with room to be and breathe in an environment of their own creation.
Brava! I especially liked this sentence:
“Making room for someone in your life means creating physical and metaphorical space for that person within your domestic, emotional and spiritual circumstances.”
I had no idea how hard it would be to make space for someone within my emotional circumstances until I tried to do it. I’m so used to being a loner, to being self-sufficient. It’s sort of become an important part of my identity, but it doesn’t work too well when you’re trying to build a relationship with someone.
Thanks for the thoughtful column, Esther!
that was fabulous…
You are starting to sound like Rabbi Aaron who talks about how G-d had to make space within himself to make room for the creation of the world. Something about broken klei’s everywhere…pass the refeer and then let’s talk about it. By the way, I deleted my myspace profile to see if I would still exist afterwards, and guess what, I’m still here procrastinating my work.