Talking to strangers in a white van
About four years ago, when my 9-year-old brother mentioned the idea of talking to strangers on Discord, I strongly discouraged him. I told him that it wasn’t safe talking to people he didn’t know in person, and that there were strangers online who trapped naive people. I laugh thinking of this memory now because… all of the people I consider as close friends at this point of time were once strangers who I talked to on a Discord server and the name of this server happened to be “[the] White Van.”
Back as a first-year undergrad student who lived off-campus, I spent an entire semester with almost no friends. My only means of socializing was an online forum where classmates asked questions about assignments, and I answered them. It gave me some recognition among peers, and honestly, I enjoyed the little fame because it made me feel less lonely. I’d embraced the thought that this was the only socializing I was going to get since I didn’t meet people in clubs or talk to people in classes. But two months into winter, during a midterm study session (that I dropped into as someone getting desperate to make friends), a classmate showed me how they made friends on a server that had a lot of people in our program. That was the beginning of social life for me, as a university student :)
On this server, I made friends who made me laugh with memes, talked about deep philosophical topics at 2 am, cried about being single at 3 am, helped me out with understanding topics the night before exams, and taught me that marks didn’t define who I was when I failed those exams. The fun part is that not only did interactions that people had with me serve as entertainment for me, but even interactions that other members had with each other made me laugh and at times, changed my perspective towards friendships. For instance, I learned that friendship can also be spending all-nighters in a computer lab making cheat sheets (and spilling coffee on them) or solving segmentation faults together. ❤ (even though I’ve never done this myself, sigh)
The experience of meeting so many interesting people online through this server changed my opinion about online communication so much that when I became a Teaching Assistant, I promoted joining servers / group-chats like White Van to communicate with more people and make friends. A lot of my students ended up joining White Van, and as more people joined this server our interesting discussions, friendships, meetups, and group-crying sessions only grew.
I hope that you get to experience being a part of a white van full of strangers as well :) because… every stranger can add new dimensions to life and every friend was once a stranger.
