This is just one of those weeks where I seem to be making exceptionally long winded posts. This morning I am in part reacting… to my reaction from Tuesday upon getting access to the New World Preview. One of the first things that I did was go through the chat settings and figure out how to effectively shut out the world. The preview had a significantly wider arrangement of people than the previous tests did, and as a result the quality of chat fell significantly. I decided for my own piece of mind that I would effectively mute everyone as a preemptive strike against toxicity.
We’ve spent a good deal of time lately talking about the toxicity of social media and the horrible things that people do to each other online. Nothing I am going to say today should discount the fact that people are often times completely awful. However this morning I had a thing happen that reminded me of what it felt like before the internet. I am not going to go into detail, largely because it is not my thing to share and didn’t directly involve me. However I very much remember the beforetimes and what it was like to live in a very small town in the middle of fly over country. I wrote about some of those experiences on Monday, from a specific point of view and I guess I am going to turn around and write about them from a different one today.
Growing up I knew I didn’t quite fit the mold that was provided before me. For starters I was significantly more sensitive than I knew I was probably supposed to be. I can’t remember explicit events, but I do remember getting my fair share of the “big boys don’t cry” nonsense. Still to this day it is awkward as fuck when I walk out of a movie theater after having been wrecked by the emotional conclusion of a movie and end up trying super hard to play it off like my eyes are watering because I have been yawning.
I also knew that my interests were not exactly drift compatible with that of many of my peers. I was lucky in that very late in my High School career I found a group of friends that I could be more myself around. I am super thankful having reconnected with my friend Jason over the last year or so, but I spent a lot of my childhood thinking something was wrong with me. My complete disinterest in sportsball and the fact that I was nowhere near as aggressive as I felt like I should be branded me as somewhat of an other. I was a fat kid (and am still a fat adult) and had way more breast tissue that I my peers making me feel a significant amount of shame any time I was pushed into a locker room situation.
Then there was the realization as things moved on that I wasn’t near as “Male” as I was expected to be. I was more or less raised by a series of strong women, and those are the people that I most identified with. I spent significantly more time with my Mom and Grandma than I did my Father and Grandfather. Don’t get me wrong, I adore my father and we get along great… I just wasn’t until scouting and realizing that he was a bit of an odd duck too that we really started to bond. Then there is the whole sexuality thing… of being MOSTLY “straight” but not quite and never really understanding exactly what that meant.
In the time before the internet, there was a lot of my life that I felt thoroughly alone. I graduated from a class of 60 students, and when you are in that situation your friendships mostly become the most compatible of what is available. I knew I wasn’t quite the way I was expected to be from a societal point of view, and because I was trying to fit in… and pushed those feels deep down to occasionally catastrophic result. I’ve struggled with “Dark Thoughts” as I call them for so many years that I am not even sure when it began, but I will say that it helped significantly to broaden my world.
As I roamed around the proto-interwebs I started to find folks that were a lot like myself. Even though at that point it was just a series of text based exchanges, it was like people were a truer version of themselves when online. When every interaction was anonymous… sure there was no reason to tell the truth, but there was also no reason not to. Growing up where I did, my world view was tragically small… and I got to meet vastly different sorts of folks in a very short period of time. I remember being introduced to two people… Semple and Dave.
Semple was sweet and outgoing and vibrant and Dave was her quiet and shy but still very sweet roommate. At that point I was into vampire roleplay on IRC, and Semple was one of my “Clan”. I’ve always been a community builder, and I built a little tribe among my Vampire “Childern”. Semple was struggling with something and I did my best to help her with whatever, but she seemed… for lack of a better word Haunted. There were times where she would not show up for days, and I would track Dave down to check on her. He would give me some excuse that she wasn’t feeling good, and that she would get back to me as soon as she could.
It wasn’t long before I started to understand the truth of the situation. Semple was the person that Dave wanted so desperately to be and was scared to death that if I ever found out the truth of the situation I would be mad. I’ve always sorta tried to take people at face value, because you find out a lot about a person by the way that they want you to see them. At this point in my life I knew nothing about Trans issues or identity, because I just didn’t have enough experience to understand it. I did however know that the person I had become friends with wasn’t a gender, and that it seemed like they were their most honest self when they were Semple.
There are a lot of people that I still wish I had contact with, from various eras of my life. Semple is one of them, because I hope she is thriving and happy. The thing with this era of the internet is that you didn’t really trade information. I guess this is why I get some cagey about the Facebook era, because in this time we were told to never share personal information because someone would come out of the internet and get you. So instead we shared our truth with our words, and rarely even traded emails. This is also likely why I seem to care way more about a persons “handle” than the real name behind it… and why it creeps me the fuck out when someone online calls me “Mark”.
Essentially, as much as I might vilify the internet and the toxicity it brings to our lives… I can’t say the beforetimes were better. Were it not for the internet and being able to find my own tribe of people and build my own support structure… I would not likely be here today. There were many times when the dark thoughts would have probably gotten the better of my will… were it not for the life long friends I have made throughout the years. Sure I am never going to sit across the table from most of them, but it doesn’t make them any less real or any less important.
This isn’t the sort of post that I am going to syndicate very widely. I go through a routine in the mornings of cross posting my blog… and when it is deeply personal like this I tend not to do that thing. This is a thing I wrote largely for myself and if you are a regular… I guess you get to follow along in that journey. I am not exactly share what this week has been about, because it seems like every day has been a significant post. Thanks for being out there even if we don’t interact much. I come to the internet to meet new people and understand points of view different than that of my own… and maybe just maybe make a good number of new friends along the way.
Thank you for sharing this. I’ve been reading your stuff for years, but this is the first time I’ve needed to comment to let you know you’re not alone.
I appreciate you dropping a line. Iv’e said it before, that a lot of days I mostly feel like I am talking to myself. I think were I to realize just how many folks are out there quietly watching me live my digital life I would probably get stage fight 🙂
You can post posts like this every day, for my money, and not just the thoughtful, philosophical ones but the slice of life ones. like the ones about your cats and the ones with pictures of your yard. It all feels very natural and you always make it interesting.
It feels very weird, when you stop to think about it, the whole progression from no social media at all to where we are now. It’s been a very, very short span of time and I’m not sure how well-suited the human mind is to coping with what is effectively a whole new set of senses. Our understanding of identity is changing so fast and frequently it feels as though most of us can’t keep up.
People do have very different ideas about whether the internet is somewhere they feel safe and able to be more open about who they are or somewhere dangerous, where they have to be very cautious. It does seem to depend what stage the digital evolution was at when they joined in as well as how old they were. In the end, though, it’s just a place like any other, filled with people, like any others. We have to use different registers and present ourselves differently depending on where we are and who we’re talking to. The main difference is the fluidity with which all of those things can change and also the difficulty in being sure which is which.
I agree, though. Better with the internet than without.
We used to talk about the internet in terms of the Gibsonian sprawl, but really it HAS become a place. While the boundaries are super fuzzy at times, it is sorta its own territory with its own rules and while it bleeds heavily upon our day to day existence it is still noticeably separate. As I talked about in my whole discussion of parasocial issues, I think the entire time you are visiting this realm… you sorta have to keep it in the back of your mind that you are in another domain and that these are real people you are interacting with. I mean I got my first real internet access in 1994, so for me this all happened in twenty six years. The strangest bit about that though is I have cross the threshold where I have lived more time with the internet than I have not.
I really appreciate this post, as my life, at least in regards to how I felt about myself and the kinds of social contact I had with people, followed a very similar trajectory. I am more “sensitive” than a man is supposed to be; I was always closer to my mom; I struggled, a lot, to fit in with in-person friends, as I grew up in a small, close-minded town (and was also fat). It was only when the internet came around that I truly started to find My People. So while there’s a lot of toxicity on the internet, I can’t say I would ever want to go back to the beforetimes, as you call them. I was very alone then, and I’m not now.
Thanks for sharing, Bel.
Thank you for posts like this.
There is a Kurt Vonnegut Jr quote from his book “Mother Night”, about an American spy who infiltrated Nazi Germany and eventually became a Nazi radio propaganda announcer who fed coded information to Allied forces: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
I think he meant it as a warning, but I believe it has a deeper meaning. Maybe who we think we are pretending to be is who we really are.
In the book, the hero returns to America after the war to find people think of him as a traitor and a war criminal.
Online, to me, you’re Bel, and that is who you really are. Who you pretended to be is now your reality.
I think the whole “fake it until you make it” maxim is true. I survived my “dark thoughts” by effectively pretending I was happy, until I figured out how to build a life that would make me happy. I built a career by pretending I had a clue what I was doing until eventually I had decades worth of experience to draw upon. I think you do become what you pretend to be. Which becomes a warning… that if you pretend to be an online troll, even if you started it maybe as a goof… you end up turning into a boorish troll in actuality. I’ve strived to be a decent human being that respects other people and I guess I became that.