Facebook?

I am battling with myself about doing the whole Facebook thing. I only did MySpace because I could have an alias. I like my internet anonymity. Of course, if you search hard enough you can piece together clues from my blogs and figure out exactly who I am... but that would take effort on your part. And, it would be slightly easier on MySpace because I talk about which bellydance troupe I dance with, and they are one of my friends and so if you look at their page you can figure out who I am with a little work.

But Facebook, that's another story. And LinkedIn too. You have to use your real name on those. I'm not sure how I feel about that. My name isn't exactly common, and I'm already too easy to find because of my job. I don't want to make myself any more vulnerable than I already am. I don't want to put myself out there on cyberspace for people to find. I like not being found. I like being able to say what I want without having to worry about someone seeing it that I wouldn't want to see it.

I could be super uptight on Facebook/LinkedIn and not put anything personal, but that seems to defeat the purpose.

I guess what I need to do is decide what facet of myself is allowed to be out there for everyone to see... regardless of what area(s) of my life the viewers are in. That's the hard part. Which "me" is acceptable to show to everyone? I'm not sure there is one.

And I don't want to have to worry about everything I say... to be so censured because someone might read it and somehow that will have a horribly detrimental affect for me (e.g. I will get put in the "no" pile when I apply for a job because I talk about hating my current or last job, or my family will disown me because they find out I'm an atheist, or a potential date will see my random comments about how I don't like to shave my legs and assume that I never shave them). I don't know. I just don't like the idea of having to put so much effort into maintaining appearances, especially online. The internet is my playground. I don't want to have to be rigid and tense here. I want to be free to express myself.

You could argue that my blog is for expressing myself and my Facebook is for appearances, but I have a really hard time keeping things like that separate. This is illustrated nicely with my two blogs. This one is supposed to be my rambly, journal-like blog and the other one is supposed to be about specific random fixations. However, my fixations are often things that I would "journal" about, and my journal-like stuff are often my fixations. So, I'm having a very hard time keeping them segregated.

I guess I will have to work on that. Perhaps Facebook would be a good place to do that... assuming I can undo things... I'm not sure I can. I don't want something to be out there permanently, displaying some stupid mistake I made that can't be undone or even forgotten.

Perhaps this topic should be on my fixations blog... but it is causing me anxiety (I keep getting invited by people to join Facebook, and I have noticed that I am blocked from some networking possibilities because I refuse to join). Damn peer pressure.

I'm usually one to avoid such things, but I guess I'm so lost right now, and it's the only option presenting itself, that it is starting to look semi-attractive.

I feel so isolated. I don't know that opening up my self (name and all) on the internet is really going to change that, but I have to do something before I make some ridiculous impulsive decision to "solve" the problem. Who knows what that might be. Facebook is probably safer than most other things I might be inclined to do (like moving to a different country with no friends/family/job/school/community to welcome me). Moving isn't going to solve anything. It would probably make things worse, as would most of my other "solutions."

Alas, here I am again, stuck between one unattractive option and another.