OK, let’s lighten things up a bit.
We themed this issue of Keys Woman around survival, basing the decision on October being Breast Cancer Awareness Month, then broadening it to encompass so much more. We’ve found and shared in these pages inspiring stories of local women’s strength, survival, healing and triumph in the face of monumental challenges — cancer, divorce, upheaval, grief, anxiety.
This isn’t one of those stories.
This “survival” story deserves no credit, and offers no inspiration. On the contrary, it could be viewed as a cautionary tale, but we figured we were ready for a little levity.
I deserve no credit, no admiration and certainly no comparison to or equivalency with anyone else in this magazine.
But I did manage to make it through my 20s on this island without any major catastrophes, trips to jail or stints in rehab — all while gainfully employed in a profession fully related to the college degree I had obtained just two months before moving here in 1998 at the tender age of 22.
Ah, the good old days, when we had a hell of a good time making bad decisions.
Fortunately, though, those were also our own personal dark ages, as social media did not exist. There was no “permanent record” of the aforementioned bad decisions. They weren’t posted, shared, liked, judged and sharply criticized on Facebook or any other digital platform. Those simply didn’t exist.
Back around 1999, we were all just getting our very first cell phones, still worrying about anytime minutes and still using the number keys to send primitive text messages, hitting the 3 key four times to type the letter F, cycling through 4, D, E, F.
Any photos from that time were taken with an actual camera, a digital camera, yes, but not one of a million ubiquitous phones. Said photos were stored, trapped actually, on memory cards until transferred from camera to computer, so sharing was neither easy nor instant. Without a worldwide distribution system, it was still possible for whatever happened in Vegas … to stay in Vegas — and Key West.
Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist, so forget Insta, TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat. And cell phones weren’t smartphones. Phones didn’t have an internet connection. We didn’t know what we were missing — or the pitfalls that awaited us.
But those old phones did something peculiar. They rang. Actual person-to-person voice calls were still the primary function of the early cell phones. Texting was still in its infancy. Emoji wasn’t even a word. We had no online profiles, other than some rudimentary AOL account that lived on our hulking desktop computer that still had a phone cord plugged into the back of it for a lagging dial-up connection. We had no news feeds, followers or Facebook friends we didn’t know and would never meet.
Google was still being populated with information. There was no Gmail and perhaps most importantly for local behavior, the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office was still a few years away from launching its online mugshot directory at keysso.net.
There were no apps. No Amazon. No online shopping, or reviews for hotels, restaurants or products.
Nothing went viral, ever. Unless it was talk of the dreaded Ebola virus in Africa.
And yet somehow, we managed. We survived. In fact, we thrived, perhaps because of our technological limitations.
I survived my 20s in Key West in spite of myself.
My fellow Key Westers of the late ’90s and early 2000s, can you imagine a sea of smartphones hovering above the dance floor at Wax around 3 a.m. while Bernie or Peter ran the DJ booth?
Have you considered the potential fallout — personally, professionally and legally — from photos taken at those bizarre after-hours parties that seemed to magically occur at closing time? The ones that made us glad we had a pair of sunglasses in our purse as we made our way home around dawn?
Technological advancements arguably have made life easier. But there is and was a time and a place for everything.
Thankfully, my 20s were behind those high-tech times. And I survived.
