I, Anonymous? May 15, 2008

Lately, I’ve begun questioning if I want this blog to remain anonymous. 
 
I’m not a dis-attached person. I never have been.
 
And I’m lazy, too. Keeping up a secret identity is a lot of work. Look at Batman! He’s so burdened.
  
Some people cry that it’s weak sauce to write anonymously. That it’s shifty to not put your name behind what you write. I’ve read anthems dedicated to the destructive arena anonymous blogging creates. That - gasp! - these anonymous writers can write anything they want and avoid accountability. How dare they.
  
There are some people that abuse their anonymity to spread ill-will. Me, though? I’m too busy spreading it of myself. 
 
Maybe if there weren’t still a part of me that felt some fear talking about my dad or my past or my self-destructive thoughts, I would just plaster my name on this thing, wag it around to everyone I meet, and call it a day.
  
Most likely though, I’d become too busy worrying about who may find this and how they might feel or what they might think. Namely, my two younger sisters. Or even my parents - albeit they’d first have to understand what a blog is and we’ve only just caught them up with the difference between email and instant chat and I’m still not convinced they completely understand. 
 
No doubt it’d cause all kinds of pain and hurt. Denials. And me feeling far more exposed than I’ve ever allowed myself to be with my family.
  
For all the shit I share about my dad and my upbringing, I try not to just rant. The importance of family - no matter how warped - has always been drilled into my head by him. That we look out for one another. That we protect each other. So when it comes to the difficult stuff, the anonymity allows me to not worry about Who I’m Supposed To Be or Who People Think I Am and just write. Rarely, if ever, have I allowed myself to be this fully honest about how fucked up I am in my “real life”. Hell, a lot of you would find me positively bubbly were you to meet me. 
  
I don’t feel some corrupt liberty to write whatever the hell I want because no one will be able to attach it to me. It’s the opposite, really. I feel pathetically attached to the things I’ve written on here and - as a result - to some really kickass people that I’ve met by doing this. When life gets chaotic, it’d be a thrill to just call some of you up and say: Dude. Where are you. Let’s grab a beer/martini/margaritas/burgers/guacamole immediately.
  
But, you know, there’s this whole anonymous thing. How much of me is this blog and how much of me is who I am in real life and will you be able to see how it all fits inside one person?
 
Maybe it’s just another example of my inability to be anything but an extreme.
  
It’s like you find an indescript bag of money at the mall on your way to buy concert tickets (Ed. note: Because if it happened to Zach Morris and the rest of the gang, it could happen to any one of us). You hesitate on what to do. You consider turning it into the police. But, after a few minutes, you can’t stop fantasizing about those tickets to that 7-night Mexican Riviera cruise with stops in Puerta Vallarta, Mazatlan and Cabo San Lucas you just read about the other day and why must Orbitz keep sending you these emails that do nothing but tease you?
  
But wait! You notice that the bag filled with money has a person’s name scrawled on it and, sigh, the i’s are dotted with hearts and there happens to be a picture inside the bag and it’s of an elderly woman and then you notice a second picture and it’s of the elderly woman’s puppy and sure, why the hell not, there’s also a journal where the elderly woman has written about how she has spent her entire life saving money so that one day, she could take her puppy to a puppy convention in Australia where it can meet not only other puppies but dingos and koalas. Now, you not only feel more inclined to return the money to this elderly woman but you have a hard time saying no when she asks if you’d like to tag along to this Australian puppy convention as her way of saying thank you.
  
Because you feel a connection.
  
What I’m trying to say - besides inconspicuously introduce the idea into your head to send me bags of money and/or concert tickets and/or puppies - is that I’m starting to feel like this blog is my elderly woman with a puppy.
  
Or maybe I’m the elderly woman with the puppy and you’re the one who found the bag of money? Or are you the elderly woman and I’m the puppy and this blog is the one who found us?
  
In any case, I feel attached.
  
And the more attached I feel to this and the more I interact with other bloggers, the harder it is to just be the ”Damsel.”
  
Although, granted, it was hard before too, since references to myself as the damsel were always done ironically and when you realize that irony doesn’t always come across in print, you worry that you’re reduced to adding or for the rest of your life to get across that you are not entirely serious. And, frankly, you’re kind of averse to the overuse of such things. (Ed. note: .)
  
I feel silly wanting to post pictures but then realizing I need to blur out faces. Or worst, cut the faces out entirely. Silly, mostly, because I am reminded of how technologically unsavvy I am by still relying on MS Paint for my photo-editing means in the year 2008.
  
And a confession? I always imagine anonymous bloggers to be attractive. Perhaps Homer was onto something by never describing Helen of Troy to exact detail (Ed. note: What? You don’t throw around references to Ancient Greek literature from time to time?), allowing the reader to conjure their own perception of absolute beauty. Even those bloggers that actively describe themselves as fat or bald lead me to think, “But maybe a sexy fat and bald. Like an overweight Bruce Willis.” (Ed. note: I enjoy both these blogs and I suspect a measure of self-deprecation as it were since Mr. Mulgrew was once listed as People Magazine’s Hottest Bachelors. And now I will stop talking about people I don’t know as though I do. I? Creepshow.)
  
What this has to do with anything, I’m not sure. But I do know that rather than setting myself up to be that girl at the bar that gets hit on by the drunk guys already around her, I’m honing in to be the girl that one of those drunk guys calls his friend to tell about and his friend comes to the bar to see this girl his friend couldn’t stop raving about and he has to say to his friend after seeing her that he’s having a hard time figuring out how banging she is because her face is cut off from the chin up.
  
I’m just too forgetful to keep any kind of charade going on for too long. Especially when that charade involves signing out of your actual Gmail account so you can sign into your blog’s Gmail account to communicate with someone that you remember only knows you by your blog identity after you’ve already begun composing the email in your actual Gmail account (Ed. Note: Ms. Pink India Ink would have no idea what I am talking about right now) and oh, this tangle of webs of semi-anonymity I’ve spun!
  
But how does one jump from anonymity to identity? A big “Here I Am” post that lays out my face, my full name, my life history and Social Security number? That makes me throw up in my mouth. All the fucking fanfare.
 
Although everyone is more than welcome to take on my credit history. 
 
In truth, one of the more unsettling parts about having an anonymous blog where you write things that are from the heart - that you try to keep well-written and interesting and creative and original (Ed. note: Emphasis, yes, on try) - is handling the dichotomy of an implied lack of ownership of all these very revealing pieces of you because you’re, well, anonymous.
  
I’ve said before that I wouldn’t be ashamed to stand by what I write. My boyfriend knows about this blog. Some close friends do too. And knowing how secrets and gossip and the world wide webs can behave, I’m sure there are a bevy of people who know who I really am and read this thing that I don’t even know.
  
But like I’ve also said before: Some of the people I reference - my friends, my family, my boyfriend - never really signed up to be a part of my blog. So for their sake - I try to maintain some privacy. Should I ever want to go public or share my stories as Me and not this Damsel in Digress persona, I guess I’d want to tell these people first. It just seems like the solid thing to do.
  
And if that happened, maybe I’d begin to have a hard time writing whatever the fuck I really wanted to write. Because no matter how often we’ve heard to just be ourselves, we’re all actors to some extent in our “real” lives.
  
Ultimately, I guess that’s why this blog remains anonymous.
 
It may be unattached to a “real” person. But it lacks the bullshit posteuring that so much of our everyday lives can get filled with.
 
Which means that for the time-being, I will continue to cut off pictures from the neck down, those that display at least a hint of cleavage naturellement, and, if I’m feeling particularly saucy, a tip of my nose to keep you on the tips of your toes.