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2010s Internet Gothic
Jan. 15th, 2016 11:29 amThis morning, after a particularly disastrous staff meeting, I posted something personal to Tumblr.
Tumblr is not the sort of discursive space that facilitates reflection, and I felt as though I was outing myself by saying how old I am, even though I'm the median age of registered Tumblr users. I don't expect to get any response, as I don't have anything even remotely resembling a following, so the act of writing and publishing the post was something resembling a dress rehearsal of identity performance.
In my professional life, I have been repeatedly discouraged from revealing too much of myself online. To give an example, the (extremely successful) blog I launched in grad school triggered a public seminar in which a panel of professors delivered scathing diatribes about how putting things on the internet can damage a young professional's reputation.
This is also the reason I started writing fic under the username "rynling" - I was deathly afraid that people would somehow connect "rynling" with "pocketseizure" and then connect "pocketseizure" with me. I'm not afraid of that anymore (I don't think anyone cares enough about me to undertake that degree of internet legwork), but I'm still hesitant to make myself vulnerable by presenting aspects of my identity that aren't limited to what is strictly necessary to maintaining a functional relationship with whatever community I happen to be operating in. What this means is that I feel a strong internal pushback against crossing the streams of my professional life and my fandom life. As a result, I feel like I'm always in the closet.
There is so much going on here with "the hidden" and "the repressed" that I'm surprised someone hasn't written a novel about this exact situation already.
ETA: I deleted the post. Fuck that and fuck me, Tumblr is indeed not the place for baring one's soul, and what I wrote was pretentious anyway. Let's pretend this never happened.
Tumblr is not the sort of discursive space that facilitates reflection, and I felt as though I was outing myself by saying how old I am, even though I'm the median age of registered Tumblr users. I don't expect to get any response, as I don't have anything even remotely resembling a following, so the act of writing and publishing the post was something resembling a dress rehearsal of identity performance.
In my professional life, I have been repeatedly discouraged from revealing too much of myself online. To give an example, the (extremely successful) blog I launched in grad school triggered a public seminar in which a panel of professors delivered scathing diatribes about how putting things on the internet can damage a young professional's reputation.
This is also the reason I started writing fic under the username "rynling" - I was deathly afraid that people would somehow connect "rynling" with "pocketseizure" and then connect "pocketseizure" with me. I'm not afraid of that anymore (I don't think anyone cares enough about me to undertake that degree of internet legwork), but I'm still hesitant to make myself vulnerable by presenting aspects of my identity that aren't limited to what is strictly necessary to maintaining a functional relationship with whatever community I happen to be operating in. What this means is that I feel a strong internal pushback against crossing the streams of my professional life and my fandom life. As a result, I feel like I'm always in the closet.
There is so much going on here with "the hidden" and "the repressed" that I'm surprised someone hasn't written a novel about this exact situation already.
ETA: I deleted the post. Fuck that and fuck me, Tumblr is indeed not the place for baring one's soul, and what I wrote was pretentious anyway. Let's pretend this never happened.
