Coffee

I'm the one up early, all my life. Today I need a break from 'who I am' both in web life, and game life. Today I really need to just be me.

Living on the internet can get a little straining. We're all learning to become icons of ourselves, our own avatars. Even if we talk about or share our real lives in pictures and video, it's not really our real lives, is it? We choose what to present. We hold back things we don't want the world to know.

I never meant to live a double life, or even a triple one. When I first started I was completely green, unaware, simply honest and as 'myself' as anyone can be. I learned fairly quickly that being myself online can make my job very uncomfortable, and not long after I learned that being myself in any interest group can get me massacred not just by antagonists, but by those calling me friend. I had already learned not to so much as put a cute picture of my full-time step daughter into a public blog for in-laws to swoop in and slay me over.

My entire life is a pretense, bumbling around accidentally getting other people upset and then withdrawing and learning how to share 'correctly', which is basically not being myself. I'm told I'm one of those outstanding writers that people look forward to, even though the only thing I've published on are free blogs. I've been told my IQ is outstanding by both psychologist and lawyer, but by no one else I know.

What is the point of being here if I am not being myself? Simply myself.

Let's see if I can find myself. Early morning, in a cup of coffee, wrestling with learning something new after an odd dream that I was a professor helping other adults understand some very simply concepts about gaming.

Because that is what I do nearly every day. I pretend to be someone on a game while I hide from a world under pseudonyms. And people believe the identities I create. They think they know me. Some have known me for years and still don't know me.

I think what started spiraling me into this direction was actually losing a friend online. Well, I've lost many, and this one wasn't even a close friend, but was someone I had known and supported for years, even had contacted about a collaboration. But because I ran with the gangs, as it were, fitting in, quite a lot was assumed upon my personality that simply wasn't true. When it finally came down to it, when I was finally pulled aside and told I elicited shock over something they couldn't share or support (seriously? that??), I came clean and point blank said I couldn't support a particular interest of theirs, either, being so blatantly dichotomous. And that is when I realized how badly misconstrued I had become, allowing myself to become locked into a crowd who automatically assumed things about me because I had figured out how to make the numbers jump around. I wasn't there to be me, and I wound up allowing myself to get pulled into quite a mess, once I stepped back and looked at the years of presence I had built up.

I'm no longer interested in who sees what I do or write. I no longer care about numbers and bots and the way the web world is set up to grind free thought into oblivion. There is no competition inside me, no need for attention. Reaching a state of popularity or weird fame for something among cohorts means nothing any more.

Today I am thinking of the years I missed really being myself because I was so tuned into running with packs with particular interests. And maybe it's time I fixed that. I want to retune my thinking back to my own vibration, my world. My real world.

This felt good.