[This is a letter written to the webmaster/friend of my friend Rheta, who brought us the news about her death yesterday. In my email exchanges with him he persists on saying "playing SL" and similar phrases, so I tried to explain SL to him.]
Good morning,
I hope you found some sleep after the shocking day yesterday. Let me give you a big thank you again for your help. You rendered an important service to the friends of Rheta. Even if this may sound bizarre to you, for us the "parallel world" as you keep naming it is very real. Unfortunately it happens frequently that someone vanishes, leaving friends and also lovers behind you martyr their brains and hearts not knowing what is up. We even have a special word for this, the "Big Quiet". Even though the message you gave us was heartbreakingly shocking, nevertheless it brought closure. Doubts and tormenting was ended and made room to healing suffering.
If you allow I would like to tell you a bit about Second Life. I googled you and even though you seem to be a "normal" person, your business has to do with dream worlds and fantasy worlds as well. I hope you might understand a little bit what I tell you.
With very little exceptions I have only met people in Second Life who have more or less severe issues in the "atomic world" as we call it. In my case it is a son with a mental condition overshadowing my whole family. One of my SL friends is confined to a wheelchair and has to hear on a daily basis that she ruined someone's life. Two of my friends suffer from autism and can only communicate freely with people in SL. One of my friends is a pre-op transgender and uses SL to be the woman she can't be in the atomic world yet. Another of my friends is the victim of multiple rapes and barely leaves her home, not to mention have social contact with men - in SL she can. I could continue this list endlessly. In Rheta's case it was probably the D/s lifestyle and her bisexuality she could not live in the atomic world due to respect for her family/husband or social norm or job repercussions or whatever. For each of us - as well as for Rheta - SL is the way to live things we could not live in the atomic world, or an escape from pressure and hardship. SL is our oasis, in which we find 1-2 hours peace and happiness a day.
One might think this is pathetic. One might think we are people poor on feelings, seeing no other way than an artificial surrogate. Maybe it is true. And surely there are people among us who lose themselves in this world, who don't find the balance. But for us residents of Second Life, for us who we LIVE in this world, it is an extension of our reality.
Thank you for listening.
4 comments:
Loses are always hard to accept, and much more at virtual worlds where there is always a place for doubt. Never heard before about the "Big Quiet", but it sounds appropiate.
So yes, closure is needed, and any help at it welcomed.
Amazing letter, Peter!
A kind and well-meant letter, Peter; I respect you for writing it.
My own experience differs from yours in terms of the fraction of people in SL who "have more or less severe issues" in RL.
It wouldn't surprise me if that fraction of SL users was a bit higher than in RL, just as the fraction of creatives and innovators is higher, but the picture you draw for Martin, of SL as a place populated almost without exception by people who for some reason face serious issues in RL, doesn't match my SL experience.
Certainly there are lots of people in SL with RL challenges, who find that SL helps them with those challenges. I know people in SL who are mildly autistic in RL, who are in RL bodies that they strongly feel are the wrong gender, who are confined for various medical reasons, or who suffer from severe agoraphobia or depression.
But I also know plenty of people who are in SL not because they face some unusual RL challenge, but rather because they see it as an empowering place where they can do things that no one can do in RL: a place to exercise creativity, to meet new people, to express themselves in new ways, none of which are driven by any unusual RL issues, severe or mild.
We all have issues of one kind or another (the moreso the more years we manage to stay alive!). And SL can be a wonderful place to escape from those issues, or to find support and help in coping with them. But SL is by no means entirely, or mostly, or even mainly, about coping with RL challenges. It is to at least as great an extent about empowering and inspiring and enriching the lives of people in general, whether or not those people have unusually challenging issues in RL.
Thanks again for your post, and for your support of Rheta's community.
For weeks I've benn thinking if I should write a comment on this post or not - mainly cause I didnt intend to see my first comment here considered as a critic to the blogger. Peter, I've really been reading you for some time - maybe not as regularly as I'd like to, but I'm one of your readers - and I really love your blog. But I realized that, since I've been really thinking of this post, I should leave you some thoughts:
1. Just like Dale, my own experience in SL is a bit different from yours. I've met people with "more or less severe issues in the atomic world", but in many cases their issues are as severe as you would expect from anyone. I mean, people have issues in their lives, it's life, not a fairy tale.
2. A person is a multiple entity. Identities are ways to classify and "freeze" that multiplicity to some extent. But people are far greater than their identities. Yes, I'm saying people are not "identical" to themselves, for I do believe that, besides being multiple, people are under a process of a sometimes faster, sometimes slower change.
3. Of course, that process responds to our history and the way we deal with it. For that reason, there are probably some events in each person's life that can be seen as "definite events", in the sense that, though they ocurred in our pasts, they don't really "pass", they remain with us in the present.
4. For what I stated in 2 and 3, I believe that people can define themselves as "people with severe issues in the atomic world", but also that even people with those issues may choose to define themselves - and may really see themselves - as something different from that. I don't consider myself a person with severe issues in the atomic world, but even if so, I am also a person who likes indie music, same-sex, open relationships, designing, being open to the world and rejecting nationalisms, and so on. All these features are identity keys to me, and some work better than others. For instance, I like to hang out with people who like indie musice, but I don't care so much to hang out with other designers. Why would an identity key like "a person with severe issues" work better than some others? It could work better, but there's also a chance that it would work worse in my case.
As a conclusion, what I'm trying to say is: defining SL citizens as people with sever issues may also lead people "out there" to keep "not getting" SL. I think SL is about possibilities, expression, experiences... Sure, it's great to people with issues in the atomic world, but also to all those who just found in such an environment a way to expand themselves, to go further, for whatever reasons that may push people into that task.
Finally, I should say: thank you for this post, it's food for thought. I do love what you write.
Hugs!
Post a Comment