Never in my life has my online presence been so uncomfortable and painful that I needed to be change and be ‘someone else’ to escape (albeit temporarily) into an alternate unreality. But the cumulative events in my ‘real life’ as well as my ‘online life’ during 2011, in particular from March through December, brought me to my knees – figuratively, emotionally, and psychologically. I broke completely in half for the first time in my life and I felt like I couldn’t even reach out and grasp onto any level of sanity. Enter LullabyGrrl: the temporary stand-in to represent “me” while I was incapable of being… me.
Floundering and drowning in circumstances that seemed worse by each passing day while I desperately tried to retreat to somewhere safe (read: I grasped at every possible place safety might exist, while failing most of the time to find anything remotely safe) I had to become someone not quite myself, but not quite a completely different person. I deliberately and methodically “became” LullabyGrrl and put ‘iKrissi’ in a holding pattern to save myself, to save iKrissi.
The quandary of not being iKrissi was inexplicable and conflicting in definition: The only way I knew (know?) how to cope with anything/everything is by sharing, exploring, and embracing others through my social media outlets.. but I didn’t I was incapable of being myself, of being iKrissi. The me that you know was far too lost to even communicate with 140 character Tweets, let alone pen strings of words laced together to form meaningful and coherent thoughts in a blog entry. On the flipside, being ‘LullabyGrrl’ represented the superficial aspects of me and it seemed slightly easier to squeeze out just enough content to maintain a few connections with the dwindling pool of persons that I felt held the highest likelihood of being trustworthy.want to be
I was able to express a little bit of myself as LulabyGrrl and keep the raw, hemorrhaging emotions as iKrissi safely tucked away from almost everyone.
Of course I never planned to be ‘LullabyGrrl’ forever, but I certainly planned to be that persona for as long as I needed to. I kept all of my iKrissi elements safely tucked away because I was fairly certain that soon I’d want to return to being myself. Because I’ve always viewed ‘iKrissi’ as not just an online version of my real name/IRL-self, but a nearly completely unfiltered vehicle of expression of what I think and experience in life, it was important to me to find my way back to ‘iKrissi’ and re-embrace what helped me grow and become who I am.
…to be who I am without needing a pseudonym like ‘LullabyGrrl’ to hide behind. To be ‘ok’ with being me, again.
Today I’m being brave, probably a bit in advance of being ready to face the things I must, by re-embracing ‘iKrissi’ and burning ‘LullabyGrrl’ to the ground. You won’t find LullabyGrrl around anymore because she is gone, deleted, purged because I’ve realized that I am still iKrissi and that my life continues even while I’m redefining who I am.
Hello and goodbye, Lullaby, it was nice being you for awhile… but I still think I prefer being… ME.
© 2012, Krissi Bates-Billings. (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
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