I am a character. I always have been. I mean it in both the Northeast Texas sense and in books. People have always called me “a character” when I cut up in public, but now I’m starting to find that it is very much true. When I enter my stream of conscience space, I step into my body electric hear it hum see it rev start it up.
I call it my conscience space, because that’s who I talk to.
And then I start talking to myself. I had a realization. I realized that when I decided to go the stream of conscience route I was in actuality allowing my two personalities to meet each other. “Have some face time,” if you will. I am not in any way talking about my mental illness. I’m talking about the voice I use every day when I’m talking to people in real life, and the voice I use when I enter into that head space and it spills onto the page. My real life is what keeps me grounded, and I think it takes living in virtual reality to know how important unplugging really is. It allowed me to really think about my role in both “worlds.” I have two personalities not because I am mentally ill, but because I became interested in the Internet the first time my father brought it home, and that was in 1993.
I met a girl online that said she was from Swansea, Wales, she was a young lesbian, and she was in a band. We were so alike that we would chat for hours. Our conversations went on for years, and then out of the blue, nothing. I have no doubt that I was catfished, but at the same time, I wasn’t mad. I didn’t let the one who catfished me meet who I am on the street. Only who I am on the web. The star of the blog is not me (not exactly, but she lives here).
The star of the blog is an operatic swell of Leslie, the part of me that’s the most dramatic and passionate about wanting you to react to what I write. I want you to think my words are beautiful, and I want you to keep them with you. It would overflow my heart if every time you read something I wrote about being wildly generous, you came back to me after reading it with a story of how you blessed someone else in remembrance of something I said. It would be my greatest honor not that you helped me, but that I enabled you to help someone else, even if it’s just yourself. That is the amazing part of having an online personality. It enables you to do an enormous amount of good in a very short time.
The dark side of having an online persona is that people get confused as to how they should treat you in real life. You’re not exactly friends, but at the same time, you both know everything about each other that’s worth knowing. It’s all out there, all over the Internet. Don’t worry, it’s awkward for us, too. We learn to stand there and say thank you, all the while hoping that you haven’t read the anal sex column.
So why did I write it?
It’s very simple. I can sum it up in three points:
It’s a marketable skill and I could wind up writing for any number of national publications. Dad, I apologize in advance that it may be Jugs or Big Butt.
I’m good at it. Sex is one of the areas that allows me to be the most free when I’m writing, because it’s one of the few times in my life where I can put down the burden that my friends are going to react to something I’ve written because its about them. My sex life is no one’s business but my own, which in my mind, makes it a very attractive genre. No one has to know who my partner was at the time the story took place, and generally, it’s not about them, anyway. Just think of me as Dan Savage in Crocs. Our relationship will go much more smoothly from now on.
People really need to know this stuff. Otherwise, they end up in embarrassing situations. In terms of anal sex, that means showing up at the emergency room and having to tell the admissions desk why you’re there. If there are levels of awkward, this ranks right up there with “shoot me.” When I write about sex, I think about the conversations that my mentor and I had when I was just starting to ask those questions. I ask myself, “based on the question that was sent in, how can you reply in the same style?” The style in question is the gentle and stern advice of an older woman to a younger one.
Here’s the most classic line I heard about sex education when I was a kid. “AIDS will kill you, but herpes is for life.”
Church.
The bottom line with this entire article is that this web site is not necessarily about me. It’s about that girl who got catfished and had developed an entire personality online without even realizing it while it was happening.
My real-life counterpart is quiet, shy, and would rather go to bed early than go to the club. My favorite thing in the world is to go to the pub with my friends, because I prefer hanging out in small groups and being able to talk than I do the pulsing music and bright lights of a gay bar. Does it have to be a gay bar? Of course it does. I have standards.
Going to gay bars is where I learned to dress like Shane (from The L Word) for the over-the-top value of it, not because I had to impress anyone. The last time I went to a gay bar was the weekend of my sister’s wedding (I think). Dana and I sat at the bar and chatted up the bartender, because while we’d chosen the biggest, gaudiest gay bar you can possibly imagine, gays don’t get up that early. The place was bangin’ and there were less than 10 people in the entire club. You don’t get hot, sweaty gay men tryin’ to get all up in your grill at 7:00.
The best thing that you can do as my real-life friend is to understand that my blog is a space of my own, and it’s where my mind flies. I can think faster and I can write longer if I have the emotional separation from my emotions enough that spilling my secrets on the Internet doesn’t seem that weird. You think you don’t know me because you’ve never seen me write like this before.
I haven’t ever written this way before. A spark has gone off in me, where I’m realizing that I have more power in my little finger than most people do in their entire bodies. This is not to elevate my ego, this is to support the entirely self-serving belief that I’m going to make it. You don’t have to believe it, but I do. When the spark went off, I felt more free than I ever had in my life.
Why free?
Because when everything that happens to you is out there like an open book, you don’t have any fear about what anyone is going to say to you. What can they say that will be more awkward that the time you felt when you wrote the article in the first place? You can move confidently through the world knowing that other people don’t have control of your publicity. You do.
I feel like I open myself to more opportunities when I talk about my life on my web site, because that means anyone who offers me a job after reading it doesn’t want to change me. They will want me to bring what I have to their company.
Having people love you for who you are is the closest thing you’ll get to finding the real number 42.
I know. I’m a character.
Stories That Are All True 