6 degrees of trepidation

Monday, January 31, 2005

I haven’t been around for a while because I’ve been busy trying to find just the right shades of brown to put back in my lately graying, formerly blondish-brunette sorta hair. The reason I was doing so was because I was going to a slumber party with five other gals and wanted to look, if not my best, at least presentable. I met the gang at Trish’s house late Saturday afternoon. I knew Trish, who knew Robbie and Andrea, who knew DiAnne and Carol. Some of us had never met before, except through our journals. Everyone knew Hunny.

I’ve always thought of my journal as an abstract piece, a breezy little bit of me that I could send out into an unknown universe without consequence or cause. Like a Navaho sand painting or a Buddhist mandala, I thought of these pages as ephemeral ~ objects created to a specific purpose; which, once completed, had fulfilled their objectives and need exist no longer. Such pieces are always anonymous, for the identity of the creator is unimportant ~ it's the act of creating, as meditation, ritual or prayer, that gives the exercise meaning. It's one of the reasons I've never backed up the files; it seemed somehow to cheat that sense of writing on the net as temporary and immaterial; a kind of great cosmic shout out that, once expressed, required and expected no other result.

In the year or so that I've been reading and writing, I've come to know, or imagine I know, other wandering souls who, for one reason or another, have felt the same communicative impulse. And I've thought of my virtual world in here as complete and separate from my actual existence because, well; up until recently, it always has been.

We all give up a certain amount o f privacy in these exercises ~ some more, some less ~ but every one of us lays bare an element of ourselves to a unknown, untested, and potentially hostile cyber-world. We present ourselves as genuinely as we can, and reach out and invite others to get to know us if they will. And they do, but always at a remove; like tinting one's hair, what is presented is always a matter of choice, and to step outside of this artificial construct is to sacrifice a huge element of control. It leaves us all vulnerable, and requires a certain amount of trust in what is, to a large extent, a self-selecting but disparate group of relative strangers.

My fellow slumber party girls were wives and mothers, professional women and friends, and I was truly moved to meet in person the beautiful young women behind the gauzy drapery of the internet. My only regret is that there was not enough time to get to know them better on an individual basis. Maybe next time. Maybe in their journals.

As I write this on Monday, it's a glorious day in California ~ the sun is shining, the wind is blowing and the girls are loaded up in Robbie's blue convertible and headed for San Diego ~ elusive, ethereal still, but intangible no longer.