How not to screw up your life
Posted By Inflate123 on May 3, 2010
One of the things I have guarded most jealously over the years is my real identity. I just don’t think the people in my real life would understand, let alone accept, my fantasy life online. I’m not ashamed of it — I think it’s pretty funny, and I like talking about it — but as we all know, it’s not about what I think of myself. It’s about what other people think of me as a co-worker, a family member, a friend, a community member, and what conclusions this would lead them to jump to. As porn goes, this interest is mostly harmless and often downright ridiculous — but it is so very, very easy to have someone use against me. So I have been adamant about keeping my lives seperate.
When I was living with my parents growing up, it was tough to keep this stuff secret for all the obvious reasons. But the older I got, the more sexual it became, and the better I got at hiding things. It went from secret experiments with inflatable vinyl toys underneath clothing to naughty drawings and amateur comics of — gasp! — rounded bosoms. When I got my own place, I still kept the drawings and printouts and photocopies and downloads in a box; nothing was on display even though it was clearly MY space. As I met more people online, all I was willing to offer was a first name. The number of people in my real life who know about my online life can be counted on both hands, and I have fingers left over.
Now I am very much an adult (though “mature” is not the first word I’d use) and happily married to a woman who knows and accepts my fetish. But even now, the most external piece of evidence of my other life is a shortcut on my PC’s desktop. It shows a Jason Waltrip BE drawing (an old commission for Sievert) and it is labeled “Smut.” When anyone comes over to the house who might ask to use my machine, I remove the shortcut before they hit the front door.
When I go online, I use similar precautions. I love Google Chrome; I use it for everything…except inflation stuff. Instead, I picked Safari as my inflation browser; it’s the only reason I fire it up. I will never accidentally send something inflatable to a coworker or a friend because the bookmarks, the interface, and the program icon all remind me who I am when I’m using it. Safari’s visual thumbnail interface shows me which smut sites are most recently updated; since there are so few places that really cater to this fetish, I’ve found 12 slots is enough anyway. When I go to Gmail in Safari, it has my inflate123 account password saved; so do all the other community forum sites and subscription services. (Similarly, when I Tweet as Inflate123 from my iPhone, I use a different app from my regular Twitter posts. No danger of being logged into the wrong account.) Everything about my inflation identity is set up automatically so I never have to think “who am I today?” And through tricks like exclusive use of Safari, I’ve trained myself to interact with the machine with one identity at a time. I am now more in control of my identities than I ever have been. I highly recommend isolating your entire inflation persona into one browser — pick one!
I have seen disaster when people in the community willingly mix their two lives. Artists who draw pervy stuff, then try to go “legit” and can never shake their online identity. Writers who use the same handle for smut and non-smut works. People who want to mix their social media circles into one big happy YouFace profile. All I can say is never, ever do it. Sooner or later (often sooner) it comes back to bite you and things never end well. I know there is a thrill to flirting with danger, and many times I’ve wanted to say “Fuck it, this is who I am, take it or leave it” — but you can’t actually control the situations that would be affected by that kind of bold choice.
If you think that maybe some day in the far future, your privacy will suddenly be important to you — you are applying for a job, you are doing online dating, you are running for office — do not trap yourself by giving away more than you should today. Ask yourself if people in this community really need to know that much about you in the first place. Nobody has read one of my stories and said “That would have been so much better if I knew your last name.” I love playing online games, but I am not going to tell people my nicknames on Xbox or PS3. I am genuinely interested in seeing who people really are through Facebook, but it isn’t going to happen. Because soon enough, someone will come along and make connections. Then they will make assumptions. And then they will make trouble.
Instead of trying to validate your secret life with your real life, just make your secret life worth living. Give valuable critiques on people’s stories when they ask. Commission works from artists. Take part in discussions about our weird little culture. Actually build the community with your presence and interaction. Be the absolute best anonymous pervert with an untraceable nickname that you can be. A lot of good can come from that — and a lot of bad can come from oversharing in the real world.
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