/whois Enesthi

I logged on today to find that someone sent me an upgrade. So now there's a one month upgrade on my account and I'm not sure how I feel about it. I'm glad and flattered that someone would want to send me such a gift, but at the same time it was so hard to let my account go before and I can't afford to keep it going. So I'm gonna have to let this account die again on January 31st, 2006. I don't want to bother putting up my stories again, knowing they'll be ignored and then removed when my time's up. At the same time I feel guilty doing nothing with the gift someone gave me. So do I put the effort into putting up my old stuff, which isn't that good anyway, or do I make random new stuff (if I'm even capable of that anymore, I've lost what little talent I had I believe.) I could just add this little file, saying thank you to the anonymous gift-giver, that I appreciate it but simply cannot bring myself to put everything up again and leave it to be ignored and die again.

I don't know where the upgrade came from even. Either one of my friends signed up and did this for me, or someone who for some reason liked my writing decided to give me an upgrade... nobody has looked at anything I left here in at least a month. Now that I've said thank you in my own way, I'm going to add in the beginnings of an autobiography I started a while ago and have never shown anyone.

/whois Enesthi
/whois Enesthi
Story of an online facade

Face 1: Ducks
Quack was the very first word I said in an online chatroom. Why? Even I don’t know. There were a lot of people talking and I simply typed in “Quack.” Someone laughed and that was the start of my first online identity. I was in that chatroom because of an advertisement I had clicked on. It was an advertisement for a long gone website which contained a text game called Equinox. I’d been looking for this type of game; just something to do when I was bored. I wasn’t looking for a place to talk or online friends; I didn’t even think about the little window below the game where people were talking about things I didn’t understand. With that first word, that initial “Quack.”, the game became unimportant as I saw an opportunity to try something new. Namely, a new identity.
I’m not big on talking, and I’m not very social. I never have been, and I probably never will be. That was a personal choice that I sometimes regret, but cannot take back. When I realized that these people on the other side of the monitor didn’t know me I saw a chance. People now would associate ducks with me. I made sure no one would forget and I’m sure most everyone was sick of me before I moved on. I joined the chatroom everyday and proceeded to develop this new identity. I wish I had thought to write down some of the conversations I had. At one point I spent an entire day improvising a duck murder mystery. All I can remember of it now is that a feather-proof vest was involved. I made people laugh, and all was right with the world.
I can’t point out the exact moment when I took on my “Queen of evil ducks” title, but I still carry that one with me. I started acting out stories in what I’d learned to refer to as “the chat.” This was along the lines of a role-playing game, except there was no game. I would pretend to send my evil duck army after people. I met my first friend this way. Part of his online name was “Fox” (I won’t say all of it, he has a right to privacy) and he acted out the “Fox” part by proceeding to eat my army. I thought this was amusing and made him a general of my army that miraculously reappeared. We got along well, and other than people calling him “Fruitbat” (there’s a story behind this, I assure you.) we both got along with everyone else.
Fox and I developed a color-coded greeting system, which annoyed others to no end. Blue was hello, green was goodbye, and black was an incredibly offensive insult that we never really defined. There were other colors as well, but I’ve forgotten them. I also developed my “Camaraderie scale” which detailed the level of attachment I had to a person. I didn’t call anyone my friend, even Fox. This was probably a precursor to my next identity, which I’ll describe later. The levels were Arch-nemesis, enemy, bystander, associate, casual acquaintance, and comrade. There was a special “social advisor” category I added later, but that’s a separate story. At this point I was becoming a bit known, at least to the “Regulars” who logged on every day like I did. I’d moved past my duck phase, and although I was still “Queen of evil ducks” I had started to develop my second, less amusing face.
Face 2: Male-basher Extraordinaire
I had never felt any interest in boys or dating when I became a male-basher. Well that’s not entirely true. I had thought about it and decided that relationships were not worth the pain and trouble. While Enesthi is a gender-neutral name, at some point people caught on that I was, in fact, female. This led to a few guys mock-flirting with me. I didn’t find it amusing and became hostile towards most males in the chat. There were a couple exceptions, like Fox, but not enough to matter. I quickly gained a love for the trout-slap function. Basically I was pretending to slap people with a very large trout. I also added a frying pan to my arsenal, which grew steadily through the months with various instruments of pain.
It was during this period that I became known for “sitting in the rafters” of the chat. People knew I was an active male-basher and some of the more masochistic males would try and rile me regularly. They almost always succeeded. I was an angry person for no reason whatsoever. I, in my own way, got to know two people who would be very important to me around this time. “Ash”, who would be the only person to earn the “social advisor” ranking, and “Arch” whose role needs its own chapter. Ash was younger than me (still is if normal time-space laws haven’t been broken) and I didn’t talk to him much at first, but he always struck me as a voice of reason and thus avoided the wrath of my trout-slap button. Arch, on the other hand, particularly bothered me for some reason. I don’t remember focusing my aggression on him but everyone says I did. He was always nice, and nobody else disliked him. I suppose I was instinctively preventing rejection by not wanting to be his friend first. I had a pretty sturdy emotional wall built up by now, so insulting people was practically second nature.
I must note at this time that I did see the irony in all of my online friends being male. I just did not get along with the female population of the chat. One girl said, much later in time, that we used to “hug” all the time and were friends, but for the life of me I could never remember any of this. One of Arch’s female friends always hated me for a difficult to determine reason. Being a male-basher seemed to surround me in males. The appearance of the guy from New Zealand (NZ for short) would ultimately break down my male-basher face, but not before I went through some other faces.
Face 3: The Employee/Alamus
This was the longest kept face of all. Nobody knew much about me at this point so I began telling them I was online at work (fact: I had never had a job in my life at this point.) Nobody really cared to disprove this. When I brought in a secondary personality, however, there were some who never believed he existed.
Alamus was a character from a novel I was, and still am, working on. I’d recently become interested in anime, so he was a stereotypical silver-haired pretty boy in my head. This was the only time I ever pretended to be a male, and my male-basher status had become secondary before I even tried it. He was supposed to be my co-worker, and we were a regular dysfunctional pair. He was semi-illiterate, quiet, and awkward. I was literate, semi-aggressive, and not afraid to say what I really thought. The character developed his own personality, to the point where I almost had myself convinced he was real. We were never truly opposites, but the occasional bit of witty banter between us kept the identities separate. Even now I refer to Alamus as a separate person, and not just an identity.
Fox and I got in an argument at one point and I stormed off to a private chat room (I had learned how to make one at this point.) Oddly enough, it was Arch, the guy I had disliked so strongly, that played mediator and cleared everything up. I hadn’t been as active in attacking him, but up until that point I hadn’t considered him a friend. What I write isn’t in an exact chronological order, but it’s close enough. So I now had Arch to talk to, and he was on almost everyday. Ash became a friend so slowly I never realized it had happened. Those three were my close friends. Ash was the only one who always doubted the existence of my “co-worker” to some degree, but Arch was the one who befriended both of my personalities.
I tried to “kill off” Alamus at one point, or at least eliminate him from the scene, but Ash talked me out of it somehow. The high point of being Alamus was when I had to pretend he was drunk. Typing that way required a lot of squinting and helped me learn just how much Arch cared about my other self. Despite my best efforts I started to care about the people I talked to regularly.
Then came Orakio. I’m fairly certain he couldn’t care less if I use his whole name. He was the same age as me, I believe, and started talking to me in odd circumstances. Orakio shared a mutual friend with Arch, although the two of them never knew each other. Oddly enough, this mutual friend was the girl who always hated me. I had been arguing with this girl a bit when he first sent me a private message, and when I found out about the mutual friend from Arch I thought he was trying to mess with me for his friend. He wasn’t, and in his odd way he amused me. We talked a bit, and even after learning about his vices (drugs are bad) I was friends with him. He wasn’t well-versed in socially appropriate behavior and got a bit too “friendly” a few times, but it was cute; kind of like a little kid looking up skirts.
I think it was around this time that NZ became an important person in my life. We started talking a lot, about music, interests, life in general. We played an online game similar to Scrabble often as well. I didn’t even realize he was trying to break through my emotional walls until he succeeded.
Face 4: Love is a four-letter word.
People learned quickly that my male-bashing ways also led to a distinct hatred for the word “love” and all things related. I would kick people out of my private chat room for daring to say it. I got a bit carried away sometimes, but I didn’t want to hear about something I couldn’t truly comprehend yet. NZ apparently saw this as a challenge and set about getting to know me. It wasn’t his initial intention to start caring about me in different ways, but that was a side-effect. So was utterly destroying me with one little email.
A couple guys had said “I love you” in the past to get me riled, which always worked. This was how I handled it, with anger. One day I checked my email to find an email from NZ. This wasn’t a first, and I was expecting more music recommendations. Instead I get this long letter going on about feelings and friendship and somewhere in there he confessed that he might be falling in love with me. I sat there for a few minutes trying to comprehend what he had said. Nobody had ever sounded like they meant it before, but he did. I was confused, then shocked, then scared. I’m pretty sure I had an emotional break down because I spent the rest of the day in my room crying and unable to think. When some of my brain had regained its function, I wrote a an email back to him using the worst language I was capable of to tell him I hated him for doing that to me. I’d just had a barrier I was so used to ripped away by this guy and he received the full force of my confused, emotional distraught state.

That's where I stopped for now... maybe I'll continue it later, maybe I'll finish it someday, who knows? Thank you, anonymous, for giving me somewhere to put this, even if only temporarily.