I should have stayed off the internet.
Too late for that now, isn’t it? But I wish I didn’t get so much into it. Or maybe I should have stayed on the educational, functional, intelligent side of it. Is there? Because it sucks that I belong to the number of people who succumbed to the traps of online escapism — roleplaying.
The could have beens outweigh the oh wells, and it annoys me because I could have done better. I could have chosen another way to deal with things. I could have just stayed off the internet. I say this because I unwittingly destroyed the beautiful parts of my youthful innocence. I used to be confident, but I notice that it has become involuntary for me to conceal my identity or push a different image of myself on the internet. (We all do it, I know, but I feel like mine’s a different brand.) I am less confident to share my thoughts, and what can make me bare my deepest thoughts would be behind a different identity. I got so accustomed to building a character outside my own and defining her personality with the things I’m afraid to show the world. I doubt everybody’s like me… Right? We all have a persona on the internet, but do we all want to exist outside of ourselves and be someone else in front of strangers? Are we all faking it?
I mean, I could have just channeled those other personalities through me, my real self. I could have just posted that angsty opinion on Facebook using my account, with my face as profile picture, and with my immediate circle as my audience — but no, I chose to log in to my roleplaying account and change the format of what I type to match my “character” and proceed with trying to sound smart and edgy about my thoughts. Nobody would judge me, the bearer of those thoughts, because the one talking is my other persona. That girl who lives in Paris, eating croissants and drinking wine with her musician boyfriend. That’s not me, that’s Gwen. And it took me a fucking decade to realize that. It sucks.
It drained my creativity too. All my 3AM thoughts, poems, short stories, were stored in different accounts that are now deleted. My precious history as a writer was there, and it’s nowhere to be found because shit happened and I had to abandon the account and all the memories tied to it (which by the way traumatized me.) All the beautiful things I wanted for my character/s should have just materialized in real life. I could have taken better photos. I could have written more stories. I could have been a real artist with my real face and the real me.
Years of faking it, the fake has become real and the real becomes blurry. Gwen has probably taken over but in the most useless way possible — I’m simply a fraud.
