the versions of me
a couple of nights ago i ended up hanging out late night with some acquaintances i hadn't seen in a while and i met a few new people too, and i think it made me realize that despite the fact that i try to be consistent about who i am no matter where i am, context plays a big role in how i'm perceived.
let's rewind a little. yurupop came into town during mardi gras. it had been a while since amber and i had any real person to person interaction, and the circumstances in which we know each other is through DDR which doesn't have the same sort of community strength or context that it used to have, but regardless, we have that connection and she happened to be able to come into town.
hanging out with her was pretty awesome. there's a connect there, the kind of person that i am and the kind of person that she is clicks well together for a solid friendship given our compatible life approach, experiences that we yearn for combined with life practicality, &c &c.
thing is, i don't think that would have been that evident before she actually came into town, which i think is my... "fault" if there's fault to be had, because i suspect that a lot of who i Truly Am is not something that comes out even a little in my online persona, and that i misrepresent myself.
a part of that is clearly deliberate. i very consciously stifle the depth of who i am on facebook because of my strong feeling that facebook is not the place in which i ever want to divulge actual information abuot myself. but i'm not sure if it ever occurred to me until the other night what that stifled personality looks like from the outside.
as in, let's suppose that i decided to facebook-friend one of the new people i met. they have a particular impression of me based on when i first walked into Coops until the end of the evening at the dba, and i think that if they started to look into who i was on facebook in particular, but also even on how i use twitter and even livejournal, they'd think i was a different person. What comes out in my online presence is, well, my online personality, which i think embraces a lot of what i feel is nerdy about me. i used to play a lot of video games, i still play a lot of word games, i do silly geeky and confusing status updates on facebook including the current 40-day-lent-status project (which will have a separate entry once it's all done). and while that feels like it's kind of me, it doesn't feel like *me*. that me isn't the social me, the drunk me, the deeply-emotional me, the sexual me, anything to do with the personality that people are attracted to as acquaintances, friends, lovers, whatever. online me, particularly facebook me, is a quirky me. the more i think about it, the more i'm surprised that people don't call foul.
of course, facebook isn't an accurate conduit for getting to know the true depth of someone. that's something i knew from the start and why i treat my social interaction the way that i do. But even *some* glimpse of life is different than how i feel i use facebook. Many people update their facebook status with things that are important to them, and resultingly it can show a glimpse of warmth. I tend to update facebook and twitter with things that have nothing to do with my warmth of personality except in deliberately cryptic fashion, so the reality that i'm generally a very warm and passionate person particularly when it comes to people is not something that would ever come across.
when it comes down to it, however, this isn't much different from the way that my actual Life has gone either. Regardless of the fact that i've always seen myself as a shy, yet open and approachable relaxed sort of personality, there have been numerous times when people have told me that their first impression of me was intimidating to them (why would he talk to me he's so awesome and i'm not) or one of underestimation (smart nerdy music guy but not much else comes across). What that does is portray me in a light that similarly usually doesn't put any degree of warmth in me.
where does this leave me practically? I'm not sure. Maybe it reinforces the idea that this blog in particular is and should be the real home base of what i'm all about to the very core, and i should be less apprehensive of posting things that deal with that core even behind a friends-lock. Maybe i'm overevaluating the need to have a public forum in which i want to express that depth - i rather like being underestimated and for there to be things about me that people have to actually work to comprehend and then decide based on that work whether or not i can fit within their life paradigm.
whatever it does, i don't think it changes much more than a nudge, but a nudge is sometimes all that's needed to make huge waves over the long term. maybe it's time to consider branching some of my expression online to include more of who i really am, even if some of it has to go behind a friends-lock. we'll see.