Where we exist
Last night I watched a documentary called "The Remarkable Life of Ibelin" about Mats "Ibelin" Steen. It made me cry. Not a lot, but a good trickle of tears that I didn't have to wring out. I went to bed after and in the morning I found and read his blog, and just reading the notice of death at the top brought the tears on, again.
I knew last night that I was crying for myself as much as for Mats. Although he had a physical disability, a true "justification", you could say, for his lifestyle... his story was extremely relatable. It made me nostalgic for the early aughts. For the Arcana days, and the early days of Livejournal. It made me miss that period of my life all over again. The friends and the life that I had online. The social and creative life that my family didn't recognize as "real".
It made me miss those days when a core group of us all convened together each afternoon online and made up stories together, made each other laugh, and shared some of our inner-most thoughts and struggles. Jojo wrote us into fantastical stories and I illustrated our forum antics. As the forum elders, dracs and I were the ring-leaders, and a regular tour-de-force of absurdist tom-foolery. Through the afternoons we cavorted in the forum, and in the evenings we read each other's journals and chatted across the various messengers of the day (I think msn and aol were still dominant, but I used an app called "Trillian" that aggregated them in one place).
Although I wasn't a gamer, we created avatars of ourselves, online personas that were both real and unreal. In private chats and journal posts we revealed our vulnerabilities and authentic selves. But outside of that we projected a better version of ourselves, cobbled together from the people we played offline and the people we wished we were. Age, sex, and physical appearance became secondary to the digital roles we personified; our minds and emotions mattered more.
So I cried for that time. And I grieved that I had not found other online tribes when that one had gradually fallen away. That my online life, just like the off, had become hidden and more insular. As those first friends faded away, I continued to write and create, but I lost the confidence to share of myself. I embraced, and accepted, solitude.
I don't spend my days feeling regretful of the choice to remain single or to spurn the majority of social opportunities. As I've grown older, it feels as though life has been set on "fast fwd" and there's just never enough time to do everything I want to do. And that thought overwhelms me. But I do regret that I have not, in all this time, managed to find my voice again online. To establish myself among a creative community who would encourage me to complete my projects, and give me that old motivation to get up in the morning that only my projects, my friends, and Kiz and Ed ever did.
I comforted myself that this is not abnormal. That most people lose touch with the friends they made in high school and college. That life becomes smaller as we grow up.
I grieved, also, for the fact of being unknown. For the thought that everything I am, everything I have created, is just so many disjointed notes and fragmented sketches spread across too many formats, both analog and digital, across too many hard drives and websites and old mobile phones to make a coherent narrative. That no one will ever see it all, or see any, of my products of the last twenty odd years. That I am as much a ghost in life as in death.
But I suppose this, too, is not uncommon. Most people are only superficially known.
I knew last night that I was crying for myself as much as for Mats. Although he had a physical disability, a true "justification", you could say, for his lifestyle... his story was extremely relatable. It made me nostalgic for the early aughts. For the Arcana days, and the early days of Livejournal. It made me miss that period of my life all over again. The friends and the life that I had online. The social and creative life that my family didn't recognize as "real".
It made me miss those days when a core group of us all convened together each afternoon online and made up stories together, made each other laugh, and shared some of our inner-most thoughts and struggles. Jojo wrote us into fantastical stories and I illustrated our forum antics. As the forum elders, dracs and I were the ring-leaders, and a regular tour-de-force of absurdist tom-foolery. Through the afternoons we cavorted in the forum, and in the evenings we read each other's journals and chatted across the various messengers of the day (I think msn and aol were still dominant, but I used an app called "Trillian" that aggregated them in one place).
Although I wasn't a gamer, we created avatars of ourselves, online personas that were both real and unreal. In private chats and journal posts we revealed our vulnerabilities and authentic selves. But outside of that we projected a better version of ourselves, cobbled together from the people we played offline and the people we wished we were. Age, sex, and physical appearance became secondary to the digital roles we personified; our minds and emotions mattered more.
So I cried for that time. And I grieved that I had not found other online tribes when that one had gradually fallen away. That my online life, just like the off, had become hidden and more insular. As those first friends faded away, I continued to write and create, but I lost the confidence to share of myself. I embraced, and accepted, solitude.
I don't spend my days feeling regretful of the choice to remain single or to spurn the majority of social opportunities. As I've grown older, it feels as though life has been set on "fast fwd" and there's just never enough time to do everything I want to do. And that thought overwhelms me. But I do regret that I have not, in all this time, managed to find my voice again online. To establish myself among a creative community who would encourage me to complete my projects, and give me that old motivation to get up in the morning that only my projects, my friends, and Kiz and Ed ever did.
I comforted myself that this is not abnormal. That most people lose touch with the friends they made in high school and college. That life becomes smaller as we grow up.
I grieved, also, for the fact of being unknown. For the thought that everything I am, everything I have created, is just so many disjointed notes and fragmented sketches spread across too many formats, both analog and digital, across too many hard drives and websites and old mobile phones to make a coherent narrative. That no one will ever see it all, or see any, of my products of the last twenty odd years. That I am as much a ghost in life as in death.
But I suppose this, too, is not uncommon. Most people are only superficially known.