My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 3 #37, March 16, 1998

ONE OF A KIND

I understand that when Ted Bundy was arrested, he was puzzled by all the fuss about the women he'd murdered. "But there are so many people," he whined. Why on earth would we worry about each individual victim? They were simply representatives of their species, and it no more mattered to him which ones he killed than which particular chicken he ate for dinner.

They were anonymous to him, generic humans. But to the people who loved them, one might have been the little girl who used to ride on top of the long-suffering collie, another the dreamer who sat for hours making up stories and telling them to her little brother, another the little girl who donated her birthday money to the food pantry. They were cherished as uniquely lovable people. And that, I'm sure, was what they wanted, what we all want.

I'm pretty sure that most of us don't want to be anonymous, don't want to be generic humans. I think our sympathies are with the girl in The Fantasticks, who sings, "I am special. I am special--please, God, PLEASE don't let me be normal." We want to be special. We want people to know, by God, that we were HERE.

The signs of our resistance to anonymity are all around us. Of course when we all wear mass-produced clothing and eat mass-produced food and drive mass-produced cars, it's hard for us to stand out from everybody else. That's probably why we put bumper-stickers on our cars, so that people will know that we are not just ANY people in a yellow Buick, but people in a yellow Buick who have a baby on board and think that "if it weren't for half the people in the world, the other half would be all of them."

It's probably why so many of us wear labels on our clothes, too, so people we do not know, who do not know us, will nonetheless know important things about us. It always amazes me the extent to which we are willing to turn themselves into walking billboards, for products, for rock groups or sports teams, for universities we may never have a hope of attending, or for sentiments (like the one I wear, "So many books. So little time").

The net has also given us a wonderful opportunity to make ourselves known, to make our small dent on the world. Many of us have created personal pages to tell the world who we are and why it should pay attention to us. Indeed, we don't just want to put a page out there--we want it to be noticed, and better yet, be chosen as a "cool site" of the day or week or hour. After all, that's what I'm doing. I go to a lot of effort to tell you once a week what I'm thinking about, and I very much want people to read my words, and talk to me (whether you agree with me or put up a stiff argument), but in any case NOTICE me.

But being known can also be constricting. When we are known, we have to put up with other people's definitions of who we are--bimbo, geek, class clown, party girl. We have to be careful what we say and how we act, because we will be held accountable for our actions. We have to be polite to nosy old ladies, gracious to the person who just beat us at tennis, forbearing with irritating children. We have to be on our best behavior. It can get a little wearing

Which is one of the reason marriage exists, because nobody can hold their stomachs in all the time. We need people who know us REALLY well and make allowances for us, people who cut us a little slack because if they see us in our bathrobes with our hair going every which way, we also see them before they've shaved and rinsed away their morning breath. We need to have people who see us in our native state and love us anyway.

But the trade off for being known and loved is the loss of privacy. Boys who leave packages of ZigZag papers in their pants pockets will face questions from mothers who wash their jeans, and unexplained hotel bills on a shared Visa card will make for lively marital discussions. This is why I suspect that we may all have at least some secret longings for anonymity, because when we are NOT known, we can explore different parts of ourselves.

When we go away to college, go off on vacation alone, or move, all alone, to places where the entire weight of our history is unknown, it can be a chance to discard other people's images of ourselves and find out what we really are or could become. Chat rooms and roleplaying games on the net offer the same kind of opportunity to try out different personas.

Our experiences with anonymity on the internet have not always been happy and playful, though. Some people have assumed other identities to entice children, to scam people or flame them. When The Well experimented briefly with anonymity, a few people in this carefully cultivated community used the opportunity to make pointed, bruising remarks about each other, almost destroying trust that had taken years to build. Of all the people who have written to disagree with my columns, the only one who has been outright nasty was the one hiding his identity under the moniker "the Thunderbolt"--and he was accusing me of refusing to accept responsibility for my actions!

And yet anonymity need not lead to churlishness. Many people have used anonymity for extraordinary acts of generosity, endowing libraries and schools and charities, or putting deserving young people through college, or paying somebody's impossibly large medical bills, while asking nothing in the way of reputation for their good works. Some heroes have rescued people from burning buildings and crushed trains without sticking around to be identified, rewarded, or interviewed on television.

Anonymity is privacy carried to its extreme, and what we do with it is also a measure of who we really are. I think we may all house several variations on our core personalities--the person our friends and casual acquaintances know, the person our families know, and the person we allow ourselves to be when we're anonymous. All of these personalities blend to make us unique. In objective fact, Bundy was right--there are indeed so many of us. But we are none of us generic humans. We are all one-of-a-kind specialty brands.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

I'll write columns here whenever I really want to share an idea with you and can find time to write them . If you want to be notified when a new one is up, send me an e-mail and include "My Word's Worth" in the subject line.