Does Anyone Know You're Here?

[kib]

A funny thing happened on the way to the forums ...

About the time I made my abrupt exit from SLN, a really startling thing happened to me. I had been struggling in my marriage, and my DH had been overseas on a 6 month assignment. I was posting here a lot about my difficulties, and working on transitioning the forum from Dave-based platform to this new one, and maybe a little out of control in what I was posting.

DH came back, I was still struggling with the massive transition between re-establishing a path of evolution and his demand that everything go back to the way it was. Still posting about it. We went to a get-together with his cousin and some friends of hers and got to talking about what we do with our lives, I mentioned this forum, and one of the friends burst out, "Oh my God, you're Kib, Karen In Bisbee!" Oh My God indeed.

Apparently I was something of a celebrity for these two lurkers, but frankly I was mortified. My online self was extremely real, but also more irascible and outspoken and forthcoming about my personal habits and thoughts than my face-to-face personality, there's a lot of stuff I wouldn't have told a casual acquaintance that these two knew about me. I love Cuz, but she's not at all on this page and would have felt alienated by a lot of the stuff I'd said here, that's not the Karen she knew. Not to mention DH being right there ... It was all fun, the lurkers didn't lord this over me in any way, and I tried to steer the conversation to their simplicity habits, not mine, but inside I was sooooo uncomfortable.

So ... several years later, DH knows I post here, I think he knows my screen name. He posts with a motorcycle forum that seems to have the same comraderie we do and has his community over there. I have never gone over to his site; I don't know if he has a presence here but I don't think so. At this time, I feel like I'm basically anonymous again, and I'm more comfortable with myself and feel like my SLN persona and my real life persona are more or less in sync.

So ... how do you manage your real life vs. your onscreen life? Has anything like this ever happened to you?

[ApatheticNoMore]

I used to keep an online dairy of sorts in blog form open to world, lots of philosophical musings etc., I mean it was designed to entertain and say something middlebrow interesting, that was high priority, not just to be a dairy. But it was also highly confessional of what I was doing in my life and my real thoughts and feelings toward it. I think someone I was in a relationship at the time with may have found it (this was over a decade ago so not some recent thing) and someone I was thinking of being in a relationship with almost certainly did and in the latter it caused all sorts of very weird and scary behavior (although my dating experiences have been a whole heck of a lot of that anyway ). None of those people were part of my life much afterward.

[iris lilies]

Oh yeah, there has been an uncomfortable interaction now and then, all my fault. But not a lot of them and hey, I do blab here more than anyone else and I've been doing it for years. No wonder! I do know that anyone reading much on this website could figure out who I am IRL if they put their mind to it. I always forget that there are lurkers.

DH and I meet up 1 or 2 times a year with someone who used to hang out on this board. She's great and her husband just took early retirement. They are very serious gardeners and share it rather like DH and I do: one of them does edibles and the other does ornamentals.

Kib, because of you I've been looking at Bisbee for snowbird vacations. It looks like a cool place although the desert isn't really my thing.

[kib]

Iris, I'd suggest Bisbee for a weekend, and not in the coldest part of the year. Right now it's really nice, will be nice again in March. There isn't enough to do to recommend it for much longer than that, and it's sort of isolated from anything else I would find exciting, but it is a neat place to spend a couple of days.

I'm pretty sure there is someone on these boards who knows you IRL, I recognized the signature style in the first post I read. Kudos to you.

ETA - I once had a private conversation with someone here who was talking about not wanting people IRL to know who she really was - i.e. her unmasked online persona. I mean in a way that implied she has a public face of some sort and I already knew it. I was fascinated but never asked.

[iris lilies]

Iris, I'd suggest Bisbee for a weekend, and not in the coldest part of the year. Right now it's really nice, will be nice again in March. There isn't enough to do to recommend it for much longer than that, and it's sort of isolated from anything else I would find exciting, but it is a neat place to spend a couple of days.

I'm pretty sure there is someone on these boards who knows you IRL, I recognized the signature style in the first post I read. Kudos to you.

ETA - I once had a private conversation with someone here who was talking about not wanting people to know who she really was. I mean in a way that implied she is a public face of some sort and I already knew it. I was fascinated but never asked.

Oh sure there is that person who I know IRL from days of yore, but that was before this board. I was thinking more along the lines of interactions with posters I "met" here.

[kib]

I have had a few "almost meet-ups" here, but never actually met anyone IRL except for the lurker girls. I'm a bit sorry I didn't meet the people who actually reached out and tried. At one point I thought an actual physical gathering of lots of us would be awesome, but on reconsideration I decided no, I really like the intimate novelty of "knowing" people for whom they wish to be, and I like the intensity of talking to people on our own terms, not the occasionally excruciating and awkward "cocktail party" persona I might meet (or be) IRL.

[CathyA]

I enjoy the anonymity. I'm very honest about myself online and never try to be someone I'm not.

I am on a local forum, but have absolutely no interest in meeting any of those people in person. although one did figure me out when we were talking in the produce section of the local store where she works. Even that was a bit scary. I'm not trying to hide anything.........just am not very social in "real life".

I am grateful for the internet, since it allows me to be social on my own terms. Yes, it's weird......but oh well, I'm weird.

[nswef]

KIB, I never made the connection with Karen in Bisbee. Pretty cool that I can remember you from back then. I don't think I'd mind seeing people In Real Life, but I don't want new friends yet. It's good to have a group where one can chat and not be terribly social, but can read what people think and react or not. I do miss the AOL forums on travel. The New York and England boards were fantastic and I miss them. Thank you
to all of you who post.

[kib]

Lol. Ironically, I changed my screen name because of people here who were concerned about my anonymity ... apparently too little too late. I don't actually care anymore, I'm now Karen In Tucson, with about 200 other Karen's, and I would like to feel I've grown less chameleon-like IRL, what I say here, I'd say anywhere.

[catherine]

Very interesting--to be called out at a function by your user name!

My family knows I post here, but they don't know my user name. There was a time back in the early 2000s when I actually stopped posting for about two years because DH had a very strange reaction to my posting things online to strangers (he really doesn't like or get the whole social media thing and is very suspicious of it). So I still keep my online persona on the downlow as far as he's concerned.

I've left in a legacy document instructions for my death, and one of the things I asked my family to do in this letter is to post here and let you guys know--not that you would care, and not that I would haunt them if they didn't do it, but being that I do care about the people here and would want to know about you all, I just thought it wouldn't hurt close the loop officially.

I did have a meet-up with another poster here (you know who you are and it was awesome--surreal actually. Like watching a cartoon on TV for years and then having the live body of the cartoon walk through the door. It was so much fun to just chat about our mutual "friends" here. I am not opposed to breaking my anonymity in those cases.