GodDAMMIT why does all the fucking drama happen as soon as I leave the (figurative) room?
MG, please don't be a frozen corpse and come back here and talk to me...
I am going to delay a little on the family profiles to talk about reality.
Because here's the deal. I started off online when I was 12 and fucking miserable. Me and my best friend would spend hours waiting, waiting for that fucking modem to connect. We were both miserable, and I can't imagine how much more so if we hadn't had each other.
We lived in a place -- and I think both of us still do, to some extent -- where there weren't really many people like us. We were smart, fucked up, naive/sophisticated young girls. We talked about the kind of things smart, fucked up, naive/sophisticated young girls talk about during the coming of age times -- silly, mostly stupid in retrospect, but so valuable to us. Things that meant something to us then.
And you know why we waited for hours, watched Heathers and Labyrinth over and over, until that old, slow modem squealed at us?
Because on the other end of it were PEOPLE LIKE US.
Yes, that BBS was local, and we got to hang out with a lot of the people we met. Both she and I wound up dating at least a couple of them here and there. Were they any better than the boyfriends I met offline? No, but then that's really not saying much.
Later when I lived all over the place...sometimes I was offline, sometimes on. I was offline mostly when I had people around me that made sense to me. Other times, I dug up that dusty old AOL floppy and dialled up. Or found a local BBS. At least, before this whole big web thing happened. And even when it resulted in blind non-dates with diabetic albino midgets and creepy married men, the rest of it...the rest of it gave me contact with people when I needed it most badly. And people that at least understood a little. Or felt like they did, it doesn't matter either way.
My last big relationship? I met him online. Basically, anyway. We exchanged writing and chatted a bit. It wasn't until we got together when he was playing a show in Philly that we actually hooked up. But we're friends to this day, and I'm glad to have known him, and glad to have been with him, and there aren't many -- actually any other ex-boyfriends -- that I say that about.
What I'm trying to get at here is that from my perspective, this IS real. No, it's not like you can walk up and hug somebody. Or that there aren't people who make their own mythologies out of self-loathing or illegal persuasions or whatever. All of that is true.
But so is the opposite. You know what this whole internet thing is (I said once)? It's a place where people can post pictures of their cats.
Because they CAN.
Because if you want to post pictures of your cats, or your kid, or your cunt, or just vomit up some of the shit life throws at you, you fucking well CAN.
Have I met people that made themselves out as other than they are? Of course.
I have also met rocket scientists. And strong, honest women. And sweet, caring men. And people who just want a place to put pictures of their cats. I have seen web sites created by people who have lives that to me would seem insane and duller than dirt, but who obviously find something there worth enjoying. I have seen usenet postings by the kids that got beat up in junior high and are still taking it out on the world at thirty five. I have seen all kinds of fan sites. I have seen teenagers struggling to find their places in the world, and I have seen teenagers complacent and content with their places in the world. I have seen many different kinds of fights, both personal and otherwise. I have seen cliques develop and dissolve, and love affairs blossom and collapse...or wind up in marriage.
And this is why I know why we fight for anonymity.
We are a civilization of martyrs, of the ashamed.
There is no person alive today that does not have a secret. Does not have something they don't want to tell anyone. Doesn't have a yearning for something that is not there. Doesn't have that fucking knot of pain that they walk around with every single fucking day of their lives until it kills them in the end.
To me, this has always been a place to exorcise at least a few of those demons.
To confess when that bastard priest doesn't cut it anymore, or even sometimes when he does.
To learn to accept some of the things about ourselves we have always been taught to hate.
But mostly. To understand that we are not alone. That there are people like us out there, in the world, somewhere.
That someone is willing to listen. Someone is willing to forgive us our transgressions, deep or shallow.
It may seem silly or crazy to some, even to us, that this tiny, painfully white screen means so much. But that's only half the truth. Because while it is nice that the screen is there, it's the people at the other end of that screeching modem that make the difference. This is a means. This is a means by which we can understand ourselves better, understand others better, escape, relate, love, hate, be -- without the peril of the terrible consequences that occur when you're looking someone in the eye.
This is not to say that this should be a replacement for life. Or that this is the only place we can be ourselves. Far from it.
What I mean is that in this world, the way this world is, almost everyone is forced into a box. Something that defines them. Or something that frightens them. Whatever it is. There is danger out there. A lot of it. Some of it is very, very real physical danger. Many of us here have been raped, molested, assaulted, beaten. Some of it is harder to see, some of it is sociological, psychological. Some of it is simply the disease of seeing too many skinny women on magazine covers; some of it is having lived with people all one's life that could never see past the mask. Or wanted to listen.
All of us, online and off, have some kind of social disease. Whether it's literal or figurative.
And so this is a place I think where we can teach ourselves some things. Learn some things from others. Understand ourselves a little more maybe than we did to begin with.
And find somebody to listen.
I know that there are many who scoff and ridicule. But personally, I am a fairly professionally successful, reasonably attractive person in a committed relationship, with great parents and a lot of people who care about me. And I take great joy in my life, as well as experiencing great sadness and the (at least much milder now) roller-coaster of depression.
And, goddammit, this is fucking real. I am real. I have been more honest here than I have ever been able to be in my life with people, including therapists, and it has helped me. It has helped me to feel more accepting of myself. It has made me feel less alone, less lonely.
Some people fall in love. I cannot see this as wrong. With a live person, are we ever totally certain that we are falling for the real thing? Any more than we can be here? Maybe we fall in love here with only a sliver of the whole, but I am not so sure that cannot be said of falling in love in this physical reality either.
As for me, I am happy with the friends I have made here. I believe in them, and I find them as real, and sometimes realer -- in the sense that people who have read me here have read things I have never spoken aloud, and other things that I have only spoken about to very few -- than the people that populate my three-dimensional plane of existence.
And you know what? If it turns out I have been believing in fairies? So what? Really, fuck it. If nothing else I have gotten more out of these fairies than so many of the people that surround me. Since I was 12, these fairies have told me each in their own way I'm okay, I'm worth loving, I love. That there are people like me. That I am not alone, that some things are just plain wrong and other things are clear and right.
Comes down to it, it's always another person at the other side, sitting in front of a glowing screen somewhere. Whether they're lying or not, whether they're good or not, it's a means to communicate in ways that can sometimes simply be too hard with that other pair of eyes staring you in the face.
- onehanded
