At 11AM my hangover is really kicking, though it didn’t begin to make its presence known until just after I stepped off the elevator at my office. I’m glad I got to work on time. Hell, I’m amazed I woke up on time given that I forgot to set my alarm or plug in my phone when I got home the night before. An unprompted 7AM wakeup after an evening spent halfway inside a wine bottle? My body wants to hurt me but doesn’t want to see me unemployed—good to know, I guess.
Between fielding phone calls, emails and making preparations for a three day weekend based around a holiday I didn’t realize existed, not to mention don’t have to work on, I stumble across a piece by Laura Matsue about her reasoning behind (mostly) disappearing from the internet. While I can’t relate on the topics of heavy adult drug use and being an artistic drifter through varying big cities in Canada, I do understand the need to distance yourself from the person you are perceived to be by anyone that thinks they’ve seen your life through whatever glimpses you’ve offered them through the computer screen. It’s hard to sever your own connection to the information super-highway, though the importance of said information is open to debate. And what’s harder than giving up the internet? Getting the internet to give up YOU.
Unlike most people I know, I hate having my photo taken. Sometimes I wonder if this is a generational thing; my 90+ year old great-grandmother looks amazing in every photo that’s ever been taken of her—a smiling vision of perfection, even with a beheaded chicken in hand. For a few years the feeling subsided and I wondered if maybe I’d outgrown feeling annoyed every time I looked at pictures of myself. But I didn’t, and I’m back to feeling like I should have complete control over photos of myself, online or not. As a self-critical individual, seldom do the pictures I see of myself meet my own quality control standards. That’s probably the real root of the issue, but I’m pushing that thought aside for the time being.
It’s less about having the photo taken than looking at it later. Why don’t I look the same in pictures as I do in my head? (Simple answer: in my head I am a gray misty something, and in print I am a very solid something.) As a kid, I hid from my family & friends whenever they toted cameras around in the hopes of capturing some magic moment.
Somewhere in the piles of stuff I haven’t talked myself into throwing out yet is a picture taken on my 15th birthday. I’m on the living room floor, held down by my friends so that my mom would have some shred of photographic evidence that not only did I have friends, but they came to my birthday party. Looking at myself in Kikwear pants and a Powerpuff Girls shirt is no less shame-inducing now than it was then. The difference is I couldn’t disappear then like I can now, after a fashion.
The disappearing started small: quickly deleting of pictures I didn’t like from my Flickr account. The joyful sensation that I was effectively disappearing was instantly exhilarating, and soon I had no photos of my face left. Two days later, I deleted the whole account. As I groomed the rest of my social networking profiles, I got pseudo-high off the process of untagging, hiding and deleting images of myself. “What a strange thing” I realized, “to be virtually invisible on the internet.” (A sign not only of the times but my excessive attachment to them, to be sure.) I’m not interested in lurking or dramatically “quitting the internet”, but there’s something important about the fact that converting myself into little more than text accompanied by a grainy, face-free user icon made the internet fun (again).
As far as Facebook is concerned, I am a default nondescript female head shape. Anything I had the power to remove, I did. A big part of me wants to keep it that way; it’s hard to see myself as being “out there” in a way that I never meant to be, in social circles that I find to be repulsive on the whole. I want to live quietly or, at the very least, keep my business off the internet. You’re smirking as you read this on my blog that I have connected to a few of my social networking presences–but I’m serious; there’s something frighteningly old-but-new (and enjoyable) about exercising strict control over what pieces of my life wind up online. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the internet in the last few years, it’s that less is more.
Clearly, I’m not looking to be anonymous–and, to be honest, it’s a bit late for that. I don’t want to be invisible exactly, but I do want to be a part of the scenery in the least distracting way possible. (Amusingly, my computer tried to auto correct that to “detracting”. Relevant?) Acting as background to my own internet presence just… feels safe. The attention from strangers for what I now think might be the wrong reasons can end anytime. What I used to think was validation just confuses me now. Why so much interest? Why the anonymously harsh criticism at every turn?
Maybe you don’t have that problem. Maybe your self-esteem is like a brick wall and you don’t question yourself, ever, because you’re the shit. Good for you! I’m my own worst critic: harsh, unforgiving, and so on. Whatever snarky comment you have to offer, I’ve already thought of.
Posting this might be breaking my only cardinal internet rule: don’t say too much. Don’t give people the type of insight that they would only have if they had gained my trust in person. But I’ve grown up posting in both public and private spaces varying portions of myself I saw fit to put down. I type faster than I write, edit more thoroughly when words are on a screen in neat little rows and frankly, I get writer’s cramp long before I’m done getting my thoughts down.
Is there a safe space in between super-internet-girl and just being me, via internet? I’m not sure and I don’t expect that anyone who would actually read a personal web blog would be, either. In other words, I might just go back to talking about strangers on the subway and varying fiction snippets for a while. When I first started keeping blogs I thought I was capable of saying something, but now I suspect I’ve said just about enough.