SoapZone Community Message Board

IA. I'm blessed to have "RL" friends and of course I have family but there are still SZ posters I feel closer to, despite never having actually met them, than I do some of my own family.

Thank you so much for saying this! That was hard for me to admit...there's still such a stigma attached to grown children living with their parents. Some assume those children must be lazy and want to be waited on, some assume there's something "wrong" with those children, some feel those kids need to "grow up" and "go be a REAL adult". I read a lot of stories on my phone about (barely) grown children who can't wait to leave the nest or stories of parents who practically kick their kids out at the age of 18. I was never NOT open to moving out but the right opportunity just never came along. I have always gotten along just fine with my parents; I probably clashed a bit more with Mom with Dad, as I'm practically Dad's mini-me in so many ways, but it was never anything serious or important. As we all got older, Mom appreciated having me to help out around the house. Dad does too. It was always just a mutually beneficial relationship for all of us and yet I often felt I was doing something wrong. I was SO gratified when I got nothing but positive feedback from SZ when I finally "outed" myself <g>. I'm sure there were lurkers who were appalled or disgusted I still lived at home but I never heard from them. And that's a big reason why SZ is so important to me: I get support when I need it.

Same!

I do that, though TBH, I never read a lot of soap-related fanfic.

Preach!

That is SO sweet!

My SZ origin story...I'm always been highly resistant to change and slow to adapt. Nowhere is this more true than in the field of technology. We didn't have a home computer until late in the 1990s. I only sporadically watched soaps back then; really, I was mostly watching only GH and then mostly for Kevin and Lucy, possibly the only TV couple EVER that I have actively shipped. When the duo left for Port Charles, I followed and stopped watching PC. Unfortunately, I didn't know anyone IRL who watched PC and was dying to know what others thought of the show, so I searched...I wanna say we had Dogpile back then (!)... and found PCO, now SZ. It was like finding long lost relatives and marveling at how much you have in common. I was not a frequent poster back then, and even when I did, most people were posting from work and offline in the evenings, which is when I posted (at that time, I had no online access at work). Over the years, posters have come and (more often) gone but SZ has remained, a comforting "constant" in the life of someone who doesn't like change, and as someone who doesn't post on other message boards nor on most social media (I put pics on Instagram and that's it), I'm so grateful for all the love, advice and support I've received over the now decades here on SZ.