Meeting People From The Internet

My world has gotten super fucking weird in the past 2 years:

Two years ago this month (in April 2021), Blake told me he wanted us to be polyamorous after 19 years of monogamous marriage. We joined FetLife to explore this.
Two years ago this coming May, we went to our first local FetLife munch, and our first Tuesday Night Coffee, hosted by HarryFromBarrie.
Two years ago this coming July, that same HarryFromBarrie and I will have been in a relationship for 2 years.
One & a half years ago (in October 2021), Blake moved out and I went from working 8-12 hours per week at my Lovely Money Job, to 40 hours per week.
In February 2022 I got a promotion and moved to a different department at my Lovely Money Job where I’m much happier.
In July 2022, I became the sole, new home owner of the home I’d been living in since 2005.
In September 2022, Blake fell in love with a new human and moved to Calgary, never to be heard from again.
In October 2022, our divorce became final per the Provincial Courts.

Those are the benchmarks of my life over the last 2 years, but it’s all just the skeleton of a much meatier journey. On that journey, I’ve somehow amassed a couple hundred new friends from all over Ontario through FetLife, similarly to how I amassed a tonne of friends when I was the panty girl for Scratching Post, or when I was a camgirl, at a time when there were only hundreds of us on the internet instead of hundreds of thousands. Apparently fitting into sexy little communities is my super power, I dunno. 🤷🏼‍♀️

And it’s been fucking weird. Really really fucking weird. I think because Fet is an online community, but it’s more expected that I could or will meet the people I interact with there, more than any other platform I’ve been on since Scratching Post’s message board, because most of them are reasonably local to me. There’s a very good chance that I’m gonna end up at an event with one or more of these Fet folks, cuz they’re all very social. That’s what they do. You can’t really do the stuff we do, or be into the stuff we’re into, without getting together in person.

This has made me reconsider my longstanding policy of never meeting “internet people”.

I swore off meeting internet people IRL in 2008, after a really negative experience meeting someone who had been following me online for about 10 years.

His name was Mr. Cat, he lived on Portland, Oregon, and I had met him somewhere around 1998 on Hole.com/HoleMusic.com, due to our mutual admiration for Courtney Love. In 2008, after knowing him online for a decade, I invited him to stay with us for a weekend during a weeks long world tour of his internet friends’ cities. I thought that after knowing someone online for 10 years, and him knowing about my mental health issues at the time, that this was an okay thing to do, that he would be IRL as he appeared to be online: very wise and open-minded for someone his age. I thought he could teach me and my family a little bit about life, since we had no elders in our own families. Mr. Cat was almost 70 years old.

Well, it was a nightmare, mostly because he turned out to be more of a fan or a sycophant than a friend, but also because he was just disappointingly and unexpectedly very crotchety and had some very crazy ideas on what society owed him as a white, cis-het male born in 1944, as you could imagine. At one point during the visit, when I was in my pajamas, almost ready for bed, he tried to take photos of me “in my natural habitat” like I was an animal in a zoo.

My friends and I, who had been excited for him to come, were just so bummed out, and the visit was so awkward, that afterwards I decided I wasn’t gonna meet people from the internet ever again.

And to blame it on Mr. Cat completely would be a mistake because it was a culmination of that visit, having a creepy run-in with someone who recognized me from the internet and may/could have tampered with my food, and getting the feeling that certain folks I’d met from the internet were only meeting me to get some kind of internet “cool points” because of my so-called “internet fame” at the time. That was the trifecta that ended me meeting internet people completely for about 15 years.

But like I said, Fet has changed that. I meet people from there at a party or Tuesday Night Coffee every week. People can see what events I’m going to be at by my RSVPs, just like the good ol’ days when I used to announce what Scratching Post shows I’d be at on my site and LiveJournal, where I’d meet Scratching Post fans and internet fans/friends. Before, it was for being a naked girl exploring instant digital photography on the internet and for being scantily clad at Scratching Post shows, this time it’s for being naked on the internet, photography and rope! Similar vibes!

One night at Tuesday Night Coffee, a girl walked in who I thought must have been a homeless crazy person by the way she was looking at me, like she was fascinated or like she knew me, even though I’d never seen her before in my life. As it turned out, she’s a Fet person, but she knew me from following me on Instagram for a few years and seemed a bit starstruck.

It was unnerving at first, and I analyzed it to death with my therapist as to why being “rockignized”, as Nicole used to call it, couldn’t be an enjoyable thing for me, but last night at a party, I realized I could relax a bit.

At this party, I looked around and realized that every person in the room was an internet person from Fet, and that I genuinely liked all the ones I knew. I was introduced to someone new and they said, “I’ve seen you on the internet”, which didn’t immediately make me panic (even though I hate facing the repercussions of my online interactions…😒). Internet people are just fellow humans and of course I talk to fellow humans face-to-face in person. Why wouldn’t I meet internet people? I DO meet internet people! As I said, Fet people at coffee, parties, or events every week!

So I guess the moral of the story here is that, if you see me out in the wild, don’t be a creep and take photos of me, realize that I’m a human being too and I don’t always look my best, and please say hello! I hate it when people e-mail me later and say they saw me somewhere but were too shy or intimidated to come say hi! Being unknowingly observed like that is unnerving and why I didn’t leave the house for 20 years, please don’t do it!

Thanks! 😊✌️ See y’all out there in the world!