a paradox of privacy
i recently joined a community on discord where each member was given two personal starting channels by default, a public one and a private one. the group is relatively small, with ~30 members in total and only a handful actively posting to their public channels at any given time, and due to this more intimate setting i have not felt compelled to post anything privately just yet. but the ongoing presence of the “private” channel still beckons out of the corner of my eye, its open invitation to post anything i want leaving me pondering: what does one share online when no one is reading?
i am, by nature, a very shy and guarded person, although things haven’t always been this way. during a brief stint in my mid-20s i spent a lot of time schmoozing, especially with the assistance of my good friends Alcohol and Tobacco, a teetering glass of red wine clasped in one hand, a cigarette threaded between two fingers of the other. then, shortly after i was released from my second psychiatric hold in 2013, i eagerly shared details about my bipolar diagnosis with anyone who would listen and afterwards, when i’d run out of sympathetic ears, on my old wordpress blog. back then my privacy wasn’t even a fledgling concern; i shared because i thought that the only way to be true to myself was to be transparent about every detail of my life.
after a time i became quieter and stopped posting things online. i think it was a combination of developed shame (which, for some reason, lagged a few paces behind my first impulse to share) and concern that co-workers or other acquaintances, people who i perhaps couldn’t trust not to think of me as crazy, might stumble across my writing and jump to unsavory conclusions. but then, as i quit my job last year to embark on a sabbatical of sorts, i decided that i wanted to start writing more prolifically and sharing online again, if for no concrete reason other than to meet people and perhaps serendipitously stumble across new experiences and opportunities which i would not have encountered if i’d carried on as an online lurker. but this time around, i felt strongly that i could only publish online if my identity were shielded behind a pseudonym.
i thought for quite some time about what pen name to choose, pondering it on-and-off for months and even brainstorming for hours with my mom during one of our bi-weekly facetime calls. beyond my initial justification - to create space for expression by avoiding embarrassing my closest circle of family and friends or having to justify my writing to them - i suppose i also thought that a pseudonym would be a source of creative inspiration. the way “yuelian” rolled off the tongue, far more lyrical and feminine sounding than my real-life name, would give me the confidence to play with flirtier writing styles and post effortlessly on twitter - or so i thought. i could live up to an imagined persona which i would never have felt bold enough to embody under my real name.
instead, perhaps unsurprisingly, i’m learning that i don’t feel any impulse to write or behave differently under my pseudonym at all. in fact, the voice of yuelian is not bolder or more creative, but rather strikingly similar and true to my own inner experience. the only time i have found myself modifying or omitting details of my life from yuelian’s writing is for brevity or when i’ve thought certain details would be too identifying.
even though i had a vague ambition to make friends and find a sense of community online, i didn’t exactly prepare myself for the logistics of pseudonymous friendship. i didn’t think about how the natural tendency would emerge, once i’d found other kindred spirits, to want to share more personal details about myself, opening my world up to theirs. i had created a “names” spreadsheet to catalogue the corresponding pseudonyms of all the real-life characters i’ve written about, but i didn’t expect to find myself referring to that same spreadsheet in order to remind myself of my cats’ pseudonyms in case they showed up onscreen in a Zoom call with someone i’d met on twitter, or when writing emails to a dear friend who knows me only as yuelian. with this pseudo-world of mine i have formed a frail bubble around me, both protecting and preventing me from becoming too familiar with anyone i meet online. the only person who has the power to pierce through this bubble is myself - a power i don’t quite know what to do with.
on any given day, a million different infinitesimal moments, feelings and sensations unfold all around and inside me, each one of them true and miraculous in a certain way. i find myself returning time and again to the heart of the question which i posed at the start of this post: in those moments where i am totally naked - stripped of both my identity and an audience - which of these innumerable, fleeting truths are worth sharing, much less remembering?
