Choosing what to do next is going to be difficult.
What do you do when you feel as if you're being sucked into an emotional supermassive black hole? And I mean the astronomical phenomenon where entire solar systems are drawn into its mass and cease to exist, NOT the incredibly amazing song by Muse that I think Edward Kyomoon should learn and sing in his natural low octave, thereby creating possibly the sexiest song performance ever in Second Life. Seriously, Ed, if you ever read this, give it a try--I know your voice, and you will have your poor partner Zoey literally having to break out the baseball bat.
We enter Second Life thinking we can just skim along the surface, but then we make connections. We make friends, we join groups. Sometimes we make more than just surface connections with people. I don't have the statistics, but I'd say a fair amount of Skype's 10 million-plus users are actually in SL at the time they're using Skype to communicate, as SL Voice can be a bit dodgy from sim to sim and region to region, and viewer to viewer. Plus, it allows private conversation that won't disturb the others around you as you're shopping or at a concert or dancing. It's when something in these connections go wrong that you find yourself where I am right now.
Of late I seem to do nothing but hurt others or get myself hurt in the process. What it comes down to is the temptation to think of those in SL as simply a collection of pixels, forgetting there are actual human beings behind the avatars. So you can end up blowing off someone or breaking their heart or pissing them off when you plunge a knife in the back and twist it for good measure, simply because there's a part of you looking at the pixels on the screen and when you do such things that avatar isn't going to immediately turn around and scream in pain or slap you. But the paradox is that human beings have made a connection together within SL, so when someone slashes you emotionally, it's always done in the area that cuts the deepest. And then it's just easy to turn off Skype or not employ the Voice button, not to mention logging out of SL, and you don't have to hear that individual when their tone of voice changes or they immediately want to tell you how hurt they are by what you said or did to them.
Of course once that expression of hurt happens, there are those for whom an apology simply will not do. That's when you get ejected from groups or you get unfriended immediately, or you get put on the Ignore list. And to those people you're not just attempting to apologize for the wrong you have committed, feeling remorse for your actions and truly wanting to make amends, but these people demand you apologize for simply existing within SL itself. I seem to be doing that a lot lately, too. And again, it's too easy for those who want to treat you that way to simply look at the screen and see the collection of pixels, not realizing that you're not only getting your own back to the human being who actually hurt you, now you're taking an additional pound of flesh and hurting them even more.
As of today, I have 3 and a half weeks left on my rental, and I've put myself on invisible to my friends list. I've become reluctant to talk on Skype or even in IM with others, because I need to decide what to do next. I can choose to terminate all my groups and remove everyone from my friends list, winding down my stay in SL until in my last act I give away what Lindens I currently have, go to the website, and terminate my account. I could choose the 'suicide by cop' route and do something to have myself banned from SL, though this option right now isn't the most likely, as it requires a level of energy I don't have currently, and I think my motivation for this route would have to be that I'm angry enough at Linden Labs to have a TOP OF THE WORLD, MA! moment.
Or I can choose to toughen myself up, completely divorce my RL self from the proceedings, and just let others only see me as the collection of pixels. And I will go along with whatever anyone wants to say or do to me--be one of a number, be the pleasure doll, be just another member of the audience, allow myself to be pulled in one direction or another without a word of protest. There will be no more connection, no more interaction than what is on the screen. I will become just as anonymous as the new people in SL who all have the last name 'Resident'.
It's only pixels. Right?
