On Sunday I’m going to meet a new friend from Twitter. That’s not bizarre — I have IRL Tumblr friends; I met my boyfriend via OkCupid; recently I landed an internship with a blogger I respect. However, this will be my first prospective friendship that feels adult, like it emerged from my professional life. I’m a little nervous.
My internet self is not particularly different from my “real” self — after all, people are multifaceted. And, to stretch the metaphor, we’re constantly rotating. Various circumstances lead me to present one side of my personality versus another.
Jamie Lauren Keiles wrote on Vice, “We need not fully become our online personas in the future, but surely we can make space for them as something real and integral to the project of building a tangible life and an authentic self.” Keiles’ quote implies that separation is the dominant state of affairs, which doesn’t jive with my own experience of online discourse or my personal digital presence.
Internet me is just me. Physical me is also me. The separation between those two self-entities, although they are perceived as culturally distinct, is obviously artificial.
I think I’m trying to convince myself that meeting this new friend won’t be weird. I want to believe that I shouldn’t be worried because me = me = me, regardless of venue. Honestly, nothing else is realistic.