Personal post is personal… unedited pics are unedited. This isn’t about fashion or culture, it’s about my brain and dealing with things I both don’t understand and understand too well.
Where do you run from yourself? For a while, Second Life was where I ran too when I couldn’t handle life anymore. It was my escape, where I could pretend that everything was just fine and take a vacation from stress and heartache.
I can’t do that any more.
I became invested – financially, socially, emotionally – my Second Life is just as rich, if not more rich than first. While I can log off when I’m hurting or find friends when I’m lonely – something that hasn’t been patched into my RL yet, I’m waiting – there are consequences here too. I work in SL, transferring a good deal of it back to my RL, and have relationships in SL. People expect things out of me and I can feel those same invisible eyes boring into me that made me want to escape RL in the first place.
I have anxiety issues. When I say anxiety issues I mean generalized anxiety disorder – not self diagnosed. There’s only so much medication can do because when it comes down to it I have to deal with the fact that a lot of the stress I feel isn’t real. In my head, the expectations are out of proportion with reality. For example, when I tell someone I’ll be free one night – I know it’s not the end of their world if I have to flake because of a client or because I got distracted playing in my inventory… but at the same time I feel like they hate me for it, like I’ve broken their confidence in me and they’ll never trust me to be there for them again. I feel like I’m being a bad friend/whatever. I feel spread thin, over-committed, overwhelmed.
There are worse things about it, but I can’t really bring myself to expose that naked truth publicly. It’s hard enough to admit to the people it matters to. What I really want to say is, don’t hate me when I get overwhelmed by IMs when I first log on and want to hide from everyone I feel is putting pressure on me. Don’t hate me when I hate myself for not being a good enough person. Don’t hate me when I wish there were another 10 hours in the day so I could accomplish everything I want to do because I chose to just hang out instead of doing what I actually intended to do.
Don’t hate me.
xoxo
-Tabby