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May. 18th, 2005 08:45 amI'm tired and reflective this morning; something about waking up at 4:30 to a helicoptor scanning nearby seems to make restful sleep evaporate. Luckily, I was up early enough to see the soft, cool, damp grey covering of the world. The dj on 88.5 seemed to be in a similar mood; dreamy, ethereal alternapop serenaded me through my entire commute.
So, I think I'm going to exorcise some ghosts.
I think it goes back to the fall of 1997, if you're looking for a definite date. At the invitation of a friend, I had joined a mailing list for all variety of freaky women (at that time, I thought it might fit for me; the only requirement was that you claim to be some form of woman, which I did then). I ran into a smart, sassy New York girlie there who, for some inexplicable reason, had a crush on me; she's the one who exposed me to Roland Barthes (referencing A Lover's Discourse in cute notes to me) and Laurence Durrell. By the fall, she was moving to Texas, and planned on driving through Atlanta in the process, so we decided to meet. I gave lots of disclaimers ("I still look like a boy", "I'll be clumsy and nervous"), but decided to go ahead anyway.
The friend who invited me to the list offered to come along, to make things less awkward, and I jumped at the chance (which in retrospect, was a bad idea; I didn't have to overcome my anxiety, but could hide behind her instead). I recognized her instantly, but was unprepared for her level of attractiveness, and that made me even more nervous and awkward. When socially uncomfortable, I tend to slip into 'safe mode', a sort of known acceptable social role in most cases, and being socialized as someone with a penis, I tend to turn to 'safe polite distant boy mode'. Obviously, this went over horribly.
We talked via email afterwards, and the question of my identity came up (of course). I went into painful detail, talking about my (developing) identity, my responses to the world, and what I feared, how I reacted. The response that stuck in my memory was, "But none of that (your identity) is visible in person". The interactions rapidly dwindled after that, and I was convinced it was because how I presented myself in written form, online, did not reconcile with 'actual' presentation of self in person, and that the latter trumped and invalidated the latter, not only in this case, but in every case.
This anxiety is still with me, particularly as the written word is where I feel most comfortable expressing myself, working through troubling issues, and propagating information about myself to others. The feared gap between these realms stresses me, a lot, and I worry still/always that people will trump my written, exposed self by their interpretation of my physical, social, present self. My anxiety about this only seems to predispose this to happen, as I still tend to default to 'safe social mode', even though I try to struggle consciously against that (which spirals into issues of transmission and reception, and of invisible or untranslatable transgressions, but that's another ghost for another time).
I want this to be gone. I want this to be the virtual sage burning, virtual purification. Laure, if you're out there somewhere, thanks for Barthes and Durrell and the attention, but I'm trying to let go of all the rest. No person should be reduced to a mental ghost.
So, I think I'm going to exorcise some ghosts.
I think it goes back to the fall of 1997, if you're looking for a definite date. At the invitation of a friend, I had joined a mailing list for all variety of freaky women (at that time, I thought it might fit for me; the only requirement was that you claim to be some form of woman, which I did then). I ran into a smart, sassy New York girlie there who, for some inexplicable reason, had a crush on me; she's the one who exposed me to Roland Barthes (referencing A Lover's Discourse in cute notes to me) and Laurence Durrell. By the fall, she was moving to Texas, and planned on driving through Atlanta in the process, so we decided to meet. I gave lots of disclaimers ("I still look like a boy", "I'll be clumsy and nervous"), but decided to go ahead anyway.
The friend who invited me to the list offered to come along, to make things less awkward, and I jumped at the chance (which in retrospect, was a bad idea; I didn't have to overcome my anxiety, but could hide behind her instead). I recognized her instantly, but was unprepared for her level of attractiveness, and that made me even more nervous and awkward. When socially uncomfortable, I tend to slip into 'safe mode', a sort of known acceptable social role in most cases, and being socialized as someone with a penis, I tend to turn to 'safe polite distant boy mode'. Obviously, this went over horribly.
We talked via email afterwards, and the question of my identity came up (of course). I went into painful detail, talking about my (developing) identity, my responses to the world, and what I feared, how I reacted. The response that stuck in my memory was, "But none of that (your identity) is visible in person". The interactions rapidly dwindled after that, and I was convinced it was because how I presented myself in written form, online, did not reconcile with 'actual' presentation of self in person, and that the latter trumped and invalidated the latter, not only in this case, but in every case.
This anxiety is still with me, particularly as the written word is where I feel most comfortable expressing myself, working through troubling issues, and propagating information about myself to others. The feared gap between these realms stresses me, a lot, and I worry still/always that people will trump my written, exposed self by their interpretation of my physical, social, present self. My anxiety about this only seems to predispose this to happen, as I still tend to default to 'safe social mode', even though I try to struggle consciously against that (which spirals into issues of transmission and reception, and of invisible or untranslatable transgressions, but that's another ghost for another time).
I want this to be gone. I want this to be the virtual sage burning, virtual purification. Laure, if you're out there somewhere, thanks for Barthes and Durrell and the attention, but I'm trying to let go of all the rest. No person should be reduced to a mental ghost.
