4:56 p.m. - 2004-03-31
The Many Incarnations of Me
It's funny, the conversations that pop up where you least expect them to. Book club on Monday turned out to be less of a conversation about our book (although we did manage to have a few discussions about it) and more a conversation about online journals, perceptions of ourselves, and life. It turned out that the people who could make it this week were all people with journals, and we ended up having a lengthy conversation about how accurately we portray ourselves in these pages. And my answer was...I don't know.
I think that I don't have a good enough perception of how others see me outside my journal to know how it relates to how people who read my journal see me. I seem to have multiple personalities depending on where you know me from - those who know me only in large group settings tend to blow me off as a loud obnoxious person without much to her, resulting in many many people being surprised when they get to know me in a one-to-one environment, expecting me to be loud and brash all the time. In smaller groups, I'm much more thoughtful and intelligent than I think I come across in en masse settings. I've given up caring that a lot of people can't be bothered to look beyond the public face - the people I care about know the real me and I'm beyond bothering about those who jump to conclusions and refuse to alter their beliefs about me.
But what about my journal self? SarahJanet has become my alter-ego in many ways - it's the name I assume everywhere I go online. But is it really me? Or is it a slightly altered me, more articulate in writing than in speech, more thoughtful in posting than in talking? I don't know. I have a hard time detaching myself from that online self and looking closely at it to see how closely it resembles my day to day self. More and more, I think the two sides of my life - the virtual and the physical - are overlapping and combining themselves, resulting in more of my true nature appearing online and more of the online side of myself manifesting itself in my offline life. Expressions that I've picked up online, things that I've learned from online friends, information I would be without were it not for the SarahJanet self find themselves working into my daily routines. More and more I find the lines between my online friends and my real life friends becoming blurred - whether it's due to online friends moving off the page or real friends becoming easier to stay in touch with online.
There are many things I automatically turn to online friends for. Problems with knitting, questions about job searching, things I'm uncomfortable about and find it easier to discuss behind the mask of my online name. It's not quite a pseudonym - it is, after all, my real name - but it is a safeguard, a mask to hide my face at least a little. But there are other things that I won't bring into the virtual world, things that I will freely discuss with my friends or Jamie but won't talk about online. I don't know where the line is or how I'd explain it. All I know is it's how I am.
It's a funny split, juggling these two selves, and it leaves me feeling torn between two worlds at times. The answer to my question is: I don't know. I don't know if the me in my journal is any less me than the me my friends talk to at book club. I don't know if it's an accurate representation of the me that they know, but I do know that in some way, on some level, everything that I write here is me. I guess it's just a case of the many versions of me, and whether the one I ramble about here is the one that other people know.
