Vulnerability

Yesterday¹ a person I work with was reading some of my various posts on this blog. This isn’t an unusual concept to me, I am fully aware that realistically my readership for these posts is a few of my friends and likely no more unless things go in some interesting directions in the next couple of years, but a particular comment stuck in my head. They described posting publicly in this way, about the things that I post about, as a point of deliberate vulnerability that they would be worried about displaying themselves; which fascinated me, because somehow I had never even considered it that way myself². So I began to wonder why.

Prologue

…I think it all began with my parents.

</therapy>

Actually, that but unironically. I spent a long time as a teenager/young adult not being able to trust the adults in my life with much, so I ended up keeping a lot to myself in general. With my close group of friends I was as open as they wanted me to be (with some VERY specific exceptions), but I was a teenager, so it was all normal teenager shit that felt like it mattered but didn’t. Not that I regret it, but in hindsight clarifying that I was still a lot more self-repressing then than I even knew at the time helps with explaining what came after.

And, of course, what came after was I got access to the internet. Discord, really, was the main one. I’ve written something like this elsewhere on this blog actually, but there’s a really specific type of friendship you build sitting in a voice call with a few people late at night. I remember everyone being really big on the whole “don’t tell anyone online your name or age or address” thing when I was a kid, but it turns out you can build a lot of trust with someone without actually doxxing yourself look how that’s going for me now lmao, and somehow it just felt… so good to actually be able to let go of all of the secrecy I’d been taught. My online friends were the first people I ever told about my previous self-destructiveness, and who I talked to about my gender when I was still trying to figure out what was going on there, and the people I felt comfortable writing and reading a bunch of questionable literature with, in a kind of shameless way I haven’t really managed to find outside of that³. And it was easy because I wasn’t me, I was the name and profile picture and minecraft skin I had chosen for myself, free to live life as this Hot Topic employee.

Then 2020 came around, and I got to do the online friendship thing again, but this time I got pranked, and those online friends I would trust with my deepest secrets were suddenly real human beings who do know my real name and address. And that turned out fine; shockingly, people are real human beings and are generally pretty cool and non-malicious, as it turns out. But I guess I kept that kind of comfort that I hadn’t really had in person before, and it was still so easy and so good to just let my words and thoughts and secrets fall out, even if I wasn’t some anonymous internet name any more.

Chapters 1-32

Thinking about it more as a current concept, there are a few different reasons I can point to that make this feel… normal, natural, something I can do and don’t really need to worry about.

The first thing is the easiest, I think. I’m trans, which means I’m just not allowed to have a bunch of secrets. I am a few years and some actual effort off of passing as cis, so when I go out wearing the clothes that I like, they become a very deep cutting kind of revelation; anyone on the street can look at me and immediately know a handful of details about my mental state, my internal sense of identity, my medical history, a decent guess at aspects of my physical health… And I can’t stop that, or at least I’m not going to, so it’s easier to just assume that everyone I talk to is conscious and aware of all of those things. And when I’m assuming someone knows about the medications I take, and the previous identity crises I’ve had, and the brainworms eating away at the back of my mind all day, why would I worry about hiding the rest of anything from them? Why not tell them about my hopes and dreams and fears? It’s not like I can give them more power over me.

At the same time, though, it isn’t actually that much power, is it? Having all of that information being so openly available means it’s not really something that can be used against me. What are you going to do, out me to my coworkers and friends? Tell my parents? Post all of my trauma online? I’m already here doing that. And I do it here, where I have control, I don’t have to debate or persuade, I get to decide what is and isn’t written. And I do, very carefully–I write about a lot, but I do still have my secrets. So I get to sit here, and play my little games, and share the things I want to share and hint at the things that are fun to hint at, and because I’m in control all of the secrets that I actually care about are tucked away safely.

It’s taken me a few days to figure out what the third point here should be–there should be three, obviously, look at the structure of the paragraphs and how they flow, the need for a third segment is obvious–but coming around now, I think it’s about my own needs as a person. I’ve been secretive in the past, I’ve hidden who I really was, and when I tried to reveal it after the fact all that secrecy came back to bite me, right? I kept my secrets so well that when I tried to share them, the people I needed most didn’t believe I could hide something like that so completely. And in telling them about myself, I learned a lot about them, and as it turned out I had misjudged who they were, and I don’t want to do that again. So being outwardly, aggressively honest about myself is a kind of spotlight I get to shine on other people; if you are going to have a problem with me, my gender, my sexuality, my history, you get to know about those things up front and I get to see your reaction. And then I get to know your secrets, too.

Epilogue

As much as I can justify it to myself, this… probably isn’t the most rational or sensible approach to my life. I get that. Getting to know upfront if someone takes issue with who I am is one thing, but there will be times when that exchange causes problems that could have been avoided if they didn’t know they take issue with who I am. The last few weeks I’ve been trying to pick a nice, gender neutral name that isn’t my actual new name, so that I can give that in talks with strangers and momentary encounters that won’t matter again–I can introduce myself as Blake and feel comfortable because it’s not the masculine name that doesn’t belong to me any more, and we don’t have to have the weird little moment where I say “hi, I’m Emma” and watch someone’s face change slightly as they reprocess their image of me as a person.

I’ve also done kind of poorly at the whole internet security thing–I’m not out here posting my address or anything, but with some detective work it wouldn’t be difficult to connect these posts to a handful of my online accounts, and then at the very least a bunch of people on Reddit know the real name of one of their forum moderators, and the city I live in, and if any of them happen to be in the same place they could probably come and track me down in person in a couple of hours. The only defence I have against any of that is obscurity, trust in the base goodwill of the average stranger, and an assumption that no one actually gives a shit about me, which is true, I think. I haven’t really done anything to anyone on the internet that I think would motivate a person to leave their house, let alone hunt me down.

But then I think about some of the stories I’ve heard, and what happens to trans people on the internet when someone figures out how to find them irl. And then I wonder if this is a good idea after all. But when I was thirteen or so I read a book called Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, and my young, impressionable mind was forever branded with the idea of “terrorists are out here to cause terror, so if you go and act terrified then they win”, and whether I actually agree with the sentiment or not it’s permanently stuck in my head now. So I don’t want to go around assuming someone is going to come and beat me up because I banned their friend on Reddit, and I certainly don’t want to change my behaviour based on that assumption. I want to live, and be true to myself doing it, and if that has consequences later I will just have to face them when they come.

Notes