rdewald's Journal: My response to eht ekoj.

So, we find out today, though you have to dig for it, that the whole Em is not Em thing is a joke. I'm still not laughing.

I want to discuss what this elicits in me, and what it reveals about my apparent expectations of the online circle. The owner(s) of the account Em Emalb is/are free to draw those boundaries where he, she or they wish. I de-friended the account for now because I simply have no interest in reading the JE's originating from the account owner(s) any more.

I am embarrassed now that I took the betrayal at face value. Many didn't. Those who want to dismiss my distress as so much insecure over-reaction now have the ammunition to do so. I feel emotionally labile and chastened, exposed and vulnerable, as there were so many that saw through the façade. Having just seen What the #$*! Do We Know, a very good movie about the uncertain nature of personal reality (which I discuss in a JE here) the incident is particularly vivid for me. As given to navel-gazing as I am, I have found that things like this which have such a powerful effect on me are particularly worth the gaze.

My humorous side is given to apply the law of quantum mechanics to the incident. That is, that there always was only a probability that the account was under the control of a person (or people) who brought the same values to our experience as I do, and that these probabilities vary not only between points in space (account-space, I suppose), but also points in time. I'd laugh if I wasn't so ashamed, I hope I can laugh about this some day soon.

I regard my journal as a place where I am given to self-expression, where said expression is given license by the fact that I impose it upon no one, and where I try to limit said expression to things about which other people may derive some benefit from reading. I take it seriously from the standpoint that I want it to have integrity of person, i.e., I wouldn't dream of allowing anyone else to post content. This standard is self-imposed. My expectations of others are only implied, and because I too am allowed to draw my boundaries where I wish, de-friending the account is enough of a solution for me. There are others here at Slashdot that I decline to friend for other reasons, some are simply cruel and antisocial, some are just dumb, some boring, some seem to come here just to antagonize.

The owner(s) of the account Em Emalb clearly regard the JE-space as more playful, less serious, and as a space where no consistent fealty to my standards of online interpersonal conduct are either implied or expected. Fair enough. It's a big world, there's room for all types in it. Certainly, we have seen all types of accounts here at Slashdot, from trolls to lifelines. Freedom implies the freedom to offend. I'm a big man, I can take it.

Had the owner(s) of the account not at one time both expressed a personal loss (the death of a father) and asked for support with a life change (stopping smoking and losing some weight), all using the same account space, I would really regard my embarrassing over-reaction as a chip on my virtual shoulder. I would not then be quite so surprised that it got knocked off, as all chips do (indeed that is why chips are placed on shoulders). But, that's not my current view of what happened.

Is/are the owner(s) of the account still smoking? Is the father still alive? Do they truly intend to move to Arizona? I have no idea, neither does anyone who is not invested with certain real-life knowledge of the personhood of the account owner(s). All of this is called into question by this incident, but the reality is it was all in question anyway, now just the boundaries are in sharper relief. It is indeed an enlivening experience to have the sensitivity I have attempted to express here both praised and violated in the same week. I'm here, I hurt.

What makes me feel so vulnerable is that I have genuinely turned to this circle for support in a life-or-death personal project. Sustaining the kind of changes I am trying to make requires the support of a social system. Usually people derive this support from friends, family, and/or organized self-help groups. In NYC, I have a very small circle of friends, none of them are interested and available enough in my life to provide the support I need. I have many wonderful friends in other parts of the country who'd give me the shirt off their back, but they lack the availability that the online circle provides. You, the reader of this JE, are there when I boot up my workstation. If you didn't care, you wouldn't visit (or comment), so through this passive sorting process I believed I might be able to accumulate a support group.

I thought I would try an experiment, to see if an online circle could provide that support, could bridge that gap, and in that process I obviously became far too reliant on my own internal construct of the reality here. A person in real life, who came up to me and said, "I've been lying to you about who I am, and I don't think I have time or energy to continue the charade" who then a few days later came back and said "Gotcha! Just kidding!" would be summarily dismissed from my life as cruel and antisocial, no matter what their history of jest. That's just who I am. Why are the rules different here? Because we can hide behind a bit-mask?

I don't know. They might be, I'm not sure they are. I am trying to tread the middle path here. My rigid attachment to a certain construct of online reality has yet again been revealed to me and I need to deal with that, but I also don't want to shut off the genuine connections I have here because of the obvious mistake of that too rigid attachment. I am a bit lost, and I'll be trying to find my way in the days that lie ahead in private because I am too embarrassed now to do it here. I'm not sure exactly what I may or may not change about the rdewald slashdot persona. There are miles to go around inside my head and heart before I can decide.

Thanks for reading. I am posting this with comments disabled because I desire none. I am acutely embarrassed at the moment and I don't want to discuss this topic in that context. Be well, I'll be back later.