I recently (okay, a year ago) joined Second Life. If you don’t know what second life is, it’s a computer program where you choose a little person to represent you in a computer generated world. You can pretty do whatever you want there. True, there are a LOT of people that just go on there to have some sort of freaky BDSM sex or something along those lines. I chose a different route. I joined a Star Trek fangroup… please don’t click onto another site yet. I’m not going to you with long-winded star trek information. I do enough of that in the group. 😀
I bring it up because something interesting happened. For some reason I chose to appear as a man. The truth is, most people go the opposite, men pretending to be women. I don’t know why this is. The reason I chose a male avatar was…. as I said, I don’t know. In role playing, you can pretty much be anyone. I chose my little Vulcan guy.
Then my second life made my real life a bit complicated. I got a crush on someone. The catch is he thought I was a guy. He was straight. So I just sat around with my crush and didn’t say a word. We were really good friends though.
Then I told him that in real life I was a woman. I still am not entirely sure why I did this. It turns out that he really liked me. After finding out I was really a woman, he got a crush on me back, and pretty quickly too. Long story short, we’ve grown very close since we first met, and are madly and nauseatingly in love. He’ll be moving to my town as a result.
It’s interesting. If I had met him in person first, he probably would never have gotten to know me. My autistic problems would have made that close to impossible. But he got to know the real me through a fake me. That is ironic. I was fully myself. No inhibitions, no worrying if I was doing the right thing, none of the social rules and faux pas that I normally have to deal with, but I was just me.
In life, I am NOT popular. My only close friends I don’t even see anymore. My best friend got a boyfriend, and I have seen her twice in the year since. And yet in this online world, I have more people to talk to than I can sometimes handle. Sure, they’re probably just aquaintances, but I don’t have any in life.
I suppose that just goes to show how much NT people rely on how well you communicate. People say that they don’t judge people, instead liking a person based on their personality, intelligence, or sense of humor. I believe I am proof that this is not really true. In person, I do everything wrong socially, say the wrong things, make people mad and uncomfortable, and am always left alone. In this metaverse, I am popular, well liked, and given respect. People come to me with their problems because I know just what to say and how to help them.
Why does this happen?? How is it possible for me to be the same in both places with totally different results. I’ll say this much, at least people in both worlds would describe me as weird. I guess I’m weird no matter where I go.