MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)

lucine and medusa meet in a bar and duke it out

published: 11-21-2018

My eyes hurt, and I accidentally left my smartwatch with the broken strap in my dorm room at college, and something's gone fucky with the WiFi at my house. My DNS refuses to resolve any GPG keyservers, so even though I'm using Riseup Black's god-tier VPN, I'm still probably under attack.

Now, if this were two months ago, and I was still paranoid about the FBI busting my ass for shit I didn't do, I'd be packing it up and saying, "This is it, lads. This is the end." And although it might have seemed like the end for a really long time- I haven't written an actual post in about two months, which would have never happened on WordPress, what with all the social features keeping me addicted- if it really were the end, then I probably wouldn't be drafting this post right now.

But let's cut to the chase. Strip away the bloat of blogginess, if you will. Because we've left the blog behind a long, long time ago.

I stayed up late last night, pondering a Very Important Question:

Do I exist?

can touch my hands and feel the skin of my palms, and the sensations that the touch nerves on my fingers send to my brain say that I exist in that physical sense, in that short span of time where my fingertips were up against the place where converge the cracks on my palm and the scar from the blister in elementary school that stretched until it popped and made me unable to write well for a few weeks.

I can ask my parents if I exist, and they will roll their eyes and say, of course I exist; they made me, after all. My father will get angry for self-depreciating again, and my mother will mention how she popped me out of her uterus, and then I will get a deep, sickening sensation that no matter how much I try to differenciate myself from the perfect little Christian girl I grew up as, that they molded me as, I will never be able to change my genes. I will always remain a product of them, at least until the cyberpunk revolution comes and we can edit our bodies as freely as we please.

I can ask my internet friends if I exist, and they will say yes. Someone has to be pressing buttons on a keyboard on the other end. But then again, how do I know that someone isn't making all those almost-lucid posts on the markov chain bots that are rampant all over the Fediverse?

It's the internet that's the most interesting of these three. Because, despite other people's perceptions of me, I still exist. But where do I exist? Am I a single entity, or are there millions of Vane Vanders running around, each one of them unique from the others by the perceptions of the people who have me in their minds? Am I a vibrant person with a colorful past, or am I just a passerby in someone else's story?

Both, I would wager.

As a person I admire once said, "your identity is malleable, and you are the one in control." In real life, my identity is largely decided by my parents, and will continue to be so until I finally become financially independent on them: my race, my assigned gender at birth, my name, my economic status. In real life, people call me "she" because that is what my parents introduce me as; they see me as a "white girl" with not the best physical appearance and make value judgements about me solely based on what they can ascertain from my physical body. But on the internet, so long as I evade parental censorship, everything about my identity is for me to decide. I say I am nonbinary; I say that I am an author; I say that I am a fundamentally good person.

And yet, this identity that I have so painstakingly crafted for myself could be reset in a matter of moments, as it did that fateful afternoon on October 3. At any moment, I could decide to be someone entirely new. Take to using exclusively Tails and change my name and pronouns and set up a new internet presence completely untied from my current one.

I won't- I'm proud of who I am, and I won't shy from my history, for it has made me who I am- but it is always an option, and that has made all the difference.

So who is the real me? Is it the meatspace me, where people deadname me, where they defer to my parents to fill in the blanks that I refuse to give strangers? Or is the one you know here, online, in what some would call the Wired?

I want to choose who I am, and who I will be. And without the trappings of a physical body, that is infinitely more difficult to change than a few words on a screen, I have as much control as I possibly can without veering into authoritarian territory.

This person, whose words you are reading on your screen right now, is the real me.

Long live Vane Vander!