Chameleons and Stigma

Despite the fact that I’ve been throwing little asides about ivanoma mistaking me for a high school student and thereby emphasizing the fact that I’m not, the most intriguing part about the internet for me is the ability to disguise things about myself obvious in real life such as health, physicality, and ethnicity, but in my case, especially age.   I don’t do this to lie, and I never imply that I’m anything other than what I am.  I simply use this facet of the internet to control the first impressions people form of me.

I’ve always been very involved in the organizations that influence my life, abnormally so.  When I was in high school, I showed up as one of only three students to the PTSA.  PTAs are for elementary and middle schools.  In high schools, students are supposed to have a say too.  However, despite my school system’s lofty ideals about students having some say, none of the adults truly trusted any of us to think at all.  If any of the S’s in PTSA actually show up, or even worse, try to speak, they’re told condescendingly that they’re only allowed to speak on student concerns.  When the chairman of my high school’s PTSA tried to pull that on one of my few compatriots, I raised my hand and asked “Seeing as this is a meeting that deals solely with the educational issues of a high school, aren’t all concerns necessarily student concerns?” (well, I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m outspoken) and the adults cooed at me when they told me to sit down and shut up.

The problem was, no matter how thoughtful, articulate, and dedicated I was, my youth was the first and therefore the only thing most adults saw.  When I first created a web profile no one had to know I was fifteen, or that I was oxygen dependant, or short and extremely physically unimposing, or even that I was a girl.  All they had to know was that I was businesslike, intelligent, gracious, and a good jeweler and metal worker.  (if anyone’s interested, I’m on deviantART under the same username).  People treated me like an adult because I presented myself maturely.  No one treated me like an idiot kid.

This anonymity makes the internet a dangerous place, as our teachers and parents were always telling us, but it also makes it freeing.  That freedom is addicting, and is more than any other reason why I keep coming back.

Of course, I ruined all of my artistic credibility by writing Harry Potter fanfic and silly blog posts, but I could always create another profile somewhere under a different name.  You’d never know it was me.