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Dear Anonymous: it's okay if you don't have an identity.

Do You Regret It?

By SWENYO ✫Published about a year ago 5 min read
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featured collages from yoswenyo via tumblr

'Anonymous' basically means a name is missing or omitted. Evoking ourselves as such feasibly grants us to be absolved of identification.

You can't regret it.

Regret is how we lament missed opportunities.

As it its often said "you can't miss what you never had." Consider that the opportunity to attach your identify itself, is a direct opportunity to confront yourself at all. To face the mirror means to identify with the reflection. But just like the reflection uses a subject with a face to match... Then avoiding the mirror doesn't mean the image suddenly belongs to someone else. The opportunity doesn't disappear either. Just becoming distant as you retract yourself.

Truly, the choice to retract your identity is okay... There are many cases where people have a reason to do so. Whether they should protect themselves or even reinvent who they are. I think we only benefit from confrontation ourselves, when we're ready and willing. Anonymity can only diverge from the default that you exist at all. It doesn't disappear you.

I personally remade F__book about six separate times within the span of four years between 2010-2014. Granted I did upload pictures of my real face onto them, but my display names were completely different. Having utilized this feature of the account settings, I was easily controlling who had access to me and what they saw. The concept of alternate online accounts, had been increasingly popular by 2019. It's usually intended to separate circles of people you know from another group. (I.E. business associates versus online contacts.) Even if you're caught square in the middle, curating feeds for separate images.

As a black sheep growing up in a dreadfully moderate suburbia, my redirection to the internet as a sort of shelter came with gradient development of my need to be visible. In real life, folks commonly shaded me as a spectacle-- it's the age old story of the Moon swallowing the Sun. You can't describe what you've yet to understand. So they gawked and choked on my light. But I'm not some spontaneous phenomena. I was just a visibly queer kid. Having alternate accounts meant that I could blend into the shadows. And be as invisible as I needed to be.

Although I would prioritize online spaces for the detachment it allowed me to achieve from life-sucking bullies and abusers... I quickly learned harassment is not functioning inside a vacuum.

I specifically valued the internet for the agency I thought it gave me over my identity.

The anonymity that drew me in, may as well have been the same thing that drew most other people to the internet. It's a neutral space, a literal grey area. The effect it has on your identity is opaque at best-- making darksided people even shadier.

The opportunity came for me to absolve myself of my identity. I took the chance to avoid a large part of mundane exposure in my life. So I succeeded in preserving my peace for a large part, which was nourishing for my mental health. I was definitely fortunate for that, and I was able to focus on getting therapy in the following years. This is how I found the opportunity to confront myself.

I've made many connections with people exclusively through social media. And in the case we did meet up in person, we can't avoid the fact that we're strangers. Even if we try to work it out and be friendly. Most of the relationship would be based in shallow interests that entertain us only for the moment. At the peak of online exposure, I amassed over thousands of followers... Whether I was presenting myself authentically did not really matter.

While I found plenty of groups that I wanted to identify with, I couldn't find any real place to belong. I didn't actually know how to express who I was. My years of therapy focused on a cognitive-behavioral level, as to understand my panic disorder in social situations. Often times I tried to reference what I represented online, in terms of reclaiming my identity and being myself. But with closer inspection none of it was about me, when I looked in the mirror I was looking for what I wanted to be.

Since I wasn't prepared to be accountable for my identity. I was only willing to displace credit. Otherwise known as blame! My privacy (albeit selective) was a way to consolidate: to have access to anything else on the internet while exchanging as little of myself as possible. So even as I tried to fly under the radar in one aspect of life, the real me pops up to attach to something else. That 'something else' I wanted to take credit for and actually identify with. It wasn't all of me.

yoswenyo.tumblr.com

There’s plenty of things posted online that people would be humiliated to have attached to them in real life. If you choose to detach from your real identity, you should be effective in dead-ing it. How do you only take credit for the parts you're eager to present, unless you acknowledge that there are equal parts that you don't want in its very contrast? It's only possible through a cognitive dissonance. You'd sooner be fulfilled by a new expression of yourself if that were the case. But most people are only semi-committed to anonymity. The same people who are conscientious of how they present themselves online, are easily caught up judging others for what they post. Sometimes that looks like admiration, because putting people on a pedestal is not having to focus on yourself.

I believe anonymity largely degrades the quality of our online experience. Anyone can be behind any screen name and avatar. So anyone is capable of absolving their accountability. That's why callout culture was so widespread and yet so ambiguous in its execution.

It's true that we should callout abuse and bigotry. That's a sentiment which personally empowered me to confide in an online support system. Although we were never meant to engage with humans strictly through a worldwide platform. Bigots get banned and reported every day, doesn't mean their accountability necessarily follows them from beyond a computer screen... whether they are identifiable or not.

You'd only really regret not having an identity because of your own hang-up in being discounted. Of course people can be happy with a lack of identity, and that's actually called being ignorant. Whether they're willing to confront themselves or to look past the context of their identity. The reality is that you're aware of it in varying degrees. What matters is how you choose to present it and own who you are.

Can't you own up to you?

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About the Creator

SWENYO ✫

Stargazer, comic reader, noodle eater.

Join the NOODLE CULT! I'll read your birth chart! ko-fi.com/noodlecult

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