I'm afraid of internet people.

I am afraid of internet people.

I am afraid of the people that are playing mmo's with me.  The people who are on my team on live.  The people i fight against in left4dead.  I am afraid of forum posters, the people who comment in blogs, online avatars and icons.  I'm afraid of messageboards, and ventrillo.  I'm afraid of twitter people who follow me without me following them, and I'm afraid of annonymous messages on AIM.

I am afraid of internet people, but god do I love the internet.

I think theres an explanation for it.  I'm almost certain their is, if you were to know me when i was 10-14 most of my time was online.  I played Gaia, Nexus, and Quiz Quiz.  I posted on forums, I met people at cons and kept talking to them in person.  I made little pieces in RM2K for others to use, I followed message boards, I posted all the time.  I was friends with the moderators, I E-mailed the webcomic makers, I IM'd messageboard members and even called some of them up, trusting them enough to give them my phone number and get mine in return.  Everything was cool, or OK back then.  They were people.

Now adays, shits a little different.  I don't trust anyone online.  I constantly change my aim name, so only people who know me and talk to me regularly know my aim name.  I jump E-mail addresses, I change services constantly, I move accounts or make new ones, so that when i lurk I lurk annonymously.  I use bugmenot on deviantart so I can see "Mature" pieces, I block AIM bots, and constantly de-friends people on facebook.  And when you compare how silent I am on the internet to how loud I am in the real world, it doesn't make sense.

To those who know me, you can see why I'm writing on this.  I check my RSS feeds literarly 4 times a day.  I love being the center of attention, i make on campus get togethers, I start up tons of conversations.  When im in the cafeteria, i literally string together 3 or 4 tables, just so all of my friends can sit together.  why the hell would I be afraid of internet people?

It makes sense, to me, when I think about the internet and my past relationship with it.  It's a time waster.  Sure, you can connect, you can socialize, you can meet and greet and connect and be a part of something bigger then you.  But I've had some less then stellar things happen online, none of which Im happy about.

I've had online girlfriends, thats confession number one.  I've been "Bullied online", is confession number two, and I've once chosen my online friends over my real world ones.  Let me explain each instance.

1. I've had online girlfriends.  Yeah, akward, I know, but consider this.  I was a fat kid, a loser, and an outcast in highschool.  No one liked me out of my direct circle of friends, no girl in the school would look at me twice, and no one of the opposite gender spoke with me for more then an hour without planting me firmly in the "Friend Zone".  I was akward, confrontational, pissy, moody and angry.  So inorder for me to find someone, anyone who would spend time with me, I turned to (guess where).  My akwardness was removed when i was online.  Suddenly I could be whoever I wanted.  I got to act out all of my romantic fantasies, playing a knight in shining armor to a girl who exsisted somewhere in NH, or Washington, or  Boston.  Somewhere, far far away from where I lived, and I would never see her face if it wasn't magnified, pixelated and digitalized but I could read her thoughts when she typed them out to me.  I would comfort her when she came back from school, and she'd be interested in the things I'd have to say.  And when one got akward, uninteresting or bothersome, I'd go back online and just meet another girl.  I had girlfriends for multiple months, their names were spins off of anime characters or roleplayed counterparts, but despite the lack of physicality, she seemed to have an invisible touch (yeah).  I'll dive deeper into this with number 3.

2. I've been online bullied.  Like I said, I was an akward, angry, unsociable guy in highschool.  My friends all played DnD with me, and while I ws a dork, I was still loud.  I was vocal in classes, I tried to have fun and where I could, and I still knew almost everyone.  All of that stuff still held true about me, but people didn't like me.  And they wanted me to know.  Regularly, people would IM me, and tell me that none of my friends liked me.  It didn't matter who my friends were.  I'd meet people in other districts, counties and schools, and somehow, some where, someone knew I had new friends, and they didn't want me to keep them.  They'd IM me, telling me they were secretly being my friendss, that they hated me, that they didn't really like my company.  And in the end, they'd always tell me to go kill myself.  This happened often, maybe once every 2 or 3 months.  Eventually, I went into the AIM settings and made it so that no one could IM me without me having their AIM name on my buddylist.  I needed to create a literal barrier of entry before you could talk to me online, because people in my highschool seriously wanted me to go jump off a bridge or go shoot myself.  Sometimes I wonder about people, and what could push someone to tell another human being "Go Die".  I have to stop thinking about it, it really just makes me depressed.

3.  I often left real world friends for online ones.  My online friends were perfect, my real world ones were flawed, just as akward as I was, and weren't female.  All things considered, it made sense.  My real world friends were akward doods, my online friends were either just as super cool and into manga as I was, or supposedly cute interesting girls who loved me just as much as their favorite comic book bishonen.  They "Loved me", in a way people in the real world couldn't, and that I needed more then I tought I needed my real friends.  Man, was I wrong.

Turns out that all I needed to kick the habbit of my online addiction was get a job.  The horrors of the real world needed to be faced, so I faced them, and now I can't go back to my escape.  infact, I'm afraid of my old escape, ot the point where I can't join any kind of online community.  I can't post on destructoid, comment on Digg items, or even talk on the champlain messageboards.  I'm too afraid.  Much too afraid, and I don't know what to do about it.

I can't play mmo's, I can't post online, I can't even talk to people on the internet without having made real contact with them in the real world.  I'm paranoid, I'm scared, and I wonder if this is the name of some kind of mental illness.

Eitherway, its something I thoght I'd scribble in digital stone, just so I can get it off my mind.  Feel free to comment, but know I might not respond ( :-P )

 - Rafi