Shadows and Avatars

If you can’t say something good about someone sit right here by me.

–Alice Roosevelt Longworth

I have a rule when I write this blog. I do not write things that I think will hurt other people and I try not to relate any stories that may betray a confidence. After all, I can never be sure who is reading.

I have been astonished at the vitriol of some of the comments posted on this blog. Recently there was a comment that is rude and hurtful to myself and to one of my subjects. I elected not to approve it because even if the writer is correct, the tone is extremely angry and arrogant. The person who made this comment also decided to denigrate me in another forum.

This person didn’t know that many of the complaints were unfounded because I elected to report on the part of the story that I felt my audience would find entertaining and not the part of the story that might have made this person happier, if it is possible to make this person happier.

In one post I wrote about a gathering at a close friend’s house and I mentioned his first name. The gathering couldn’t have been more innocuous and the reference couldn’t have been less controversial, still my friend was quite upset because mutual friends mentioned it to him and he didn’t like seeing his first name on the internet.

I was taken aback because I didn’t understand his issue. It was a small part of a large post that was about something else entirely. I had only used his first name. I couldn’t see the harm.

I removed the few sentences that named him and strangely enough I felt that it improved the content. It is now tighter and clearer. His section was only a benign digression and he acted as an unwitting editor.

This made me think of the larger implications of writing this blog. I have attempted to craft an online persona very close to my own. Yet, writing about one’s self and one’s experiences is by nature an incomplete view of what has happened since I only have a first person perspective. I have occasionally tried to change my perspective by writing in the second or third person as I did in the posts “Chapter Two” and “Failure to Communicate.”

A year ago I became interested in people who tried to change identities completely, creating new names and identities, and then disappearing. I ordered several books from Amazon about how one goes about changing identities. Soon after I had started researching this topic, I found myself in a bit of an uncomfortable situation with security officers at the airport and wondered if my research into this topic had caused me to be placed on a government watch list. If I had been, I placed my official self in jeopardy by wondering what it would be like to invent a shadow personality, a doppelgänger who may or may not have a separate name but who might be free to act in a different or perhaps more reckless way than my “real” self.  I wrote about this before I came to Argentina in “The Midlife Protection Plan”

This story has been about the improvement in my outlook by remaking myself, so I am a different person than when I started, both because of the journey and because of reporting it. The subject of this blog is the beginner’s journey and about the many errors one makes in that process. Sometimes the desires of the audience or even the knowledge that there is an audience has changed both my perspective and my writing.

There are others who left pseudonymous comments or sent mysterious e-mails. Their comments sometimes intrigue me and I wonder about their intent. Often the writer’s attempt to remain anonymous worries me. It is as if some people have created avatars, or characters that exist only in an artificial world like Second Life, and imagined a connection with my online persona. I am always happy to engage in conversation with friends and readers and often these mysterious people serve as true inspiration, but I am not an avatar. While this journey is imaginative and fanciful, it takes place in real time and is written by a real person.

I didn’t expect my gentle little journey to be so controversial. Perhaps my friend was right to be upset that he was included. Sometimes I’m upset that I am included as well and so there will be a time later this year when this blog will end.

SEE ALSO: THE MIDLIFE PROTECTION PROGRAM

SEE ALSO: “ON LANGUAGE; AVATAR,” THE NEW YORK TIMES, August 10, 2008