FACING THE ANONYMOUS YOU

Observing your anonymous behavior is an opening into a more accurate appraisal of who you really are. This window into our souls has become readily accessible to us by some social networking apps and open-commentary sites on the internet. As government authorities now close in as censors of those platforms, the crying over privacy and free speech becomes more boisterous in some quarters. In other quarters, people scatter to The Dark Web to be their dark selves.

There is nothing unusual about your anonymous self. We all have one, or more than one. These dark mirrors of our souls vary somewhat in their divergence from the face we put on, like preening geishas, for those whom we know in three dimensions. The conscientious and saintly most likely differ very little in the light of real life from their anonymous selves. The psychopath, on the other hand, may have a public persona that is charming while harboring an anonymous serial killer beneath it. 

If you drive a car by yourself in urban America, you have most likely met one of the unavoidable aspects of your anonymous self. For example, if you text while driving, you must accept that one aspect of your anonymous self is socially irresponsible and danger-seeking. If you get enraged when you see someone driving and texting, you must accept that part of your anonymous self yearns to enforce social control over others to allay your fear.

Twitter, that vast plain of outrage porn, is probably the fastest and easiest way to find your anonymous self, if you use a nom de plume. Reading your tweets some time after writing them is revealing. Sometimes worthy of a cringe or two, even if you take time before writing your tweets. 

Perhaps your anonymous self has a third face, if you are also a Facebook user. Facebook is the ultimate media tool of self-invention. Unlike the blunt realism of inspecting yourself as a lone driver or a lone tweeter, Facebook is a foggy landscape of fantastical idealism. The family photos, the anniversary announcements, the sappy animations ... they can all be used shrewdly to portray a you which you wish you could be, especially in the eyes of those whom you wish to impress. 

Facebook you is perhaps more deceptive than the you which you portray in three dimensions when you are among people who might know who you are.

Gay men of my era took sexual anonymity for granted as part of our lives. I suppose this gave me a head start at observing the anonymous expressions of me as opposed to the more conventional social expressions of me. And I did observe them. I used that observation to try to better integrate my sexual self as a person who sought and enjoyed sexual intimacy along with commitment in relationships. 

I think the accessibility to these different aspects of me has been helpful. At the very least, I now know when I am verging on hypocrisy or dishonesty from studying my anonymous expressions of myself. My anonymous self has clued me into my triggers, those things in my environment which evoke strong emotional reflex. In some ways, my anonymous self is able to go right to those feelings in an expressible way which I would never allow myself in a social situation where I would then be accountable or liable for those expressions of feeling.

The worst possible lies are those you tell yourself. Facing the anonymous you can be a step to respecting and accepting yourself as a whole person with many aspects to your personality, some admirable and some not. Shame may be an essential part of that process initially. There is nothing wrong with that, if it motivates change to increase your personal integrity and self-respect.