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rynneSo. Here's that explanation post I promised you all, but I have one request before I say anything more.
This is a public post because I feel that everyone who has friended me deserves, whether I friended them back or not, to know what I've been doing and decide accordingly whether they want to keep me as a friend or not. All of you who I have friended have the same option, of course. But that is the only reason this is a public entry--please treat it as though it was friends-only, or something, and do me the courtesy of not talking about what I'm saying here in your journal or, if you don't mind, in anything but private correspondence with me. This is also the kind of thing that might end up on LJDrama or Fandom Wank, but anyone from either of those places...please, don't post anything about this. Treat it as a friends-locked post, for all that it's public, and I'll really appreciate it.
Now for the reason I delayed posting until now, which ties into the whole thing.
I wanted to wait until the stress of finals was over before I added the new stress of people likely being mad at me.
Yes, finals. My last day of school, and my last day of my junior year at Reno High School, was Wednesday. I am sixteen years old, and will be turning seventeen on September 16, 2004.
Let me first say that I absolutely hated lying to you all, once I started getting to know you, and that I was continually nervous that one of you would figure out that I was missing information or something like that and that you'd hate me. It's not much to say that I didn't know any of you when I started it and so it didn't matter, because it does matter now, and when someone in real life pushed the issue with me, I was actually rather relieved that the stress of lying is over now, and I can talk to you without being afraid of telling the truth. So I didn't want to lie to you. But why did I?
Stupid reason, really. I wanted to join the SBRL yahoo group (and ironically enough, I'm not so much interested in it anymore), only I needed an adult Y!ID. So I made one (and picked May 14th for a birthday only because fourteen was my favorite number and I'd always wanted to be born in May). It wasn't that hard, and tons of underage people do it all the time. But one of the reasons I joined the group was to post the new fics I was writing (also ironically, fics that I cringe at the thought of now). Eventually I wanted to post them other places as well, and once I found FictionAlley, it seemed the perfect archive for me. So I joined. Only, probably very naively, I thought that if I told people my real age (fifteen at the time), I would be kicked out of the SBRL group (would I have? I don't know--all I know is that I was still new enough to the fandom that I didn't want to be forced to leave one of the few places to discuss R/S that I'd found, because even then I loved the pairing so), so I told people I was nineteen. I figured it wouldn't be that hard to pose as a college student, especially when, as a junior, I was encouraged to ask questions and find out as much about college as possible from my parents, teachers, whoever. It wasn't a big deal.
It probably still wouldn't have been a big deal if I hadn't started getting to know some of the people at FictionAlley and the SBRL group, and started considering them friends. And I thought that those tentative friendships, which I already really liked, would be ruined if I revealed that I've been lying about my age, and I didn't want that. I liked you people, and you liked me, and I wanted to get to know you better. Definitely a mistake, because it would make me more likely to slip up, and it would have made things harder when I finally did tell you (damn, it's hard right now!), because I just...didn't want you to hate me. And I got to know you better, and some of you I consider close friends and almost sisters, and I hate disappointing you like this because I choose to lie and keep lying.
I don't know how much you'll trust my word on this, but I promise you that age-related issues were the only things I lied about. I changed my birthday, my age, and my school, and made up a small bit of information as background between how old I am now and how old I was posing as, and that's it. I live in Reno, Nevada, I am a tap dancer, I have a twin sister and a little sister, I do swordfighting, I watch anime and play video games...all of that is real, and really me. The personality behind the posts is still real, and I'm still the person that some of you have talked to--just a little younger than you thought.
I also do not find my real life remarkably deficient in that I had to make up an online persona in order to feel worth something, or any of that junk. I have no problems with being sixteen, except that I am not legally allowed to join adult groups (though I suppose I haven't been acting an adult by lying, have I? *sigh*). I have a good life--I took three AP classes this year, English, US History, and Spanish. Next year I hopefully will be taking a class at UNR (University of Nevada, Reno), along with three more AP classes. My family's very supportive of me, and I love my friends. Problems with my real life are not what drove me to doing this.
The real reason, I think, is that I wanted to try and live without the considerations of being a minor and all that entails. I want to be able to vote (though I couldn't care less about drinking and gambling), and I want to be able to hold an adult discussion and look at things generally considered acceptable only for adults. I have been reading things that could be considered NC17 since I was eleven years old, when my own mother gave me some books containing explicit sexual scenes. And for the most part, my friends in real life (though why we term it that, when you're as real as any of them, I don't know), are uncomfortable discussing some of the things I really like to talk about (such as Remus/Sirius--only one actually likes the pairing, and most of the others don't even like slash), so...I looked online for that discussion, and found it in age-protected groups.
Now that I've come clean, there are two things that really concern me right now. The first is all of your reactions, because I still really don't want you to hate me, and I hope you at least understand. Especially those of you I've talked to personally on IM, and especially the ones I've frequently talked to via IM, I feel like I've really wronged you, and I just hope you forgive me.
But the second one, and the one slightly more worrying to me right now, is FA. I love being an eMentor, and I love being a coder. I don't want to give those up. But I know that this revelation hardly makes me look good, and being as I am in some position of authority, however small it is, I hope this doesn't impact too badly on FA as a whole. I feel terrible, lying to Sabs and Anya for eMentors, and Plu when she was training me for coding. I think that they and Heidi would be fully within their rights to take those privileges away from me, though I sincerely hope they won't, because they're things that I love doing, and things that I've really thrown myself into doing, and I like to think that I've been doing a good job, and I can say now that the revelation of my age is not going to impact the kind of job that I've been doing, except in that I may work harder to try and make up for it. I'll understand if they trust me less, but I just hope that they'll let me stay and try to do my job well to make up for it.
I know I've hurt many of you by lying to you, and some more than others. If anyone wants to defriend me over this, I wouldn't blame you, though I fervently hope that you'll all give me a second chance. I'm not going to delete this journal, or leave the fandom, because while I've been cowardly, I hope that I'm braver now. And I won't lie to you any more.
I still intend to keep writing. My parents don't know, don't want to know, and don't care what I do on the internet, so I will likely keep writing NC17 as well, as well as reading it, which I've been doing for years anyway. Those of you I beta for, and who beta for me, I hope you forgive me and let me continue. I don't know what will happen to my fics at adult archives, but it doesn't matter to me as much right now, not half as much as all of you do.
I'm sincerely sorry I did this. I made a choice, and it was the wrong one, and I regret it. I know that things would have been better for me if I'd been truthful from the beginning, but I very likely wouldn't know all of you, and wouldn't know some of you that I really consider good friends, and while I regret lying, I don't regret getting to know you. And whatever else comes of this post, at least I know that I can tell the truth now, because I hated the lying. And all I can do is hope that you'll forgive me. Maybe I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, but I'd rather do that than make a molehill out of a mountain, and I'm not sure which this would be. It's for you to decide.
If there's anything you would like to discuss with me that I haven't brought up, feel free to email me. I'll reply when my mail decides to let me in.
I hope to remain your friend,
Rynne
This is a public post because I feel that everyone who has friended me deserves, whether I friended them back or not, to know what I've been doing and decide accordingly whether they want to keep me as a friend or not. All of you who I have friended have the same option, of course. But that is the only reason this is a public entry--please treat it as though it was friends-only, or something, and do me the courtesy of not talking about what I'm saying here in your journal or, if you don't mind, in anything but private correspondence with me. This is also the kind of thing that might end up on LJDrama or Fandom Wank, but anyone from either of those places...please, don't post anything about this. Treat it as a friends-locked post, for all that it's public, and I'll really appreciate it.
Now for the reason I delayed posting until now, which ties into the whole thing.
I wanted to wait until the stress of finals was over before I added the new stress of people likely being mad at me.
Yes, finals. My last day of school, and my last day of my junior year at Reno High School, was Wednesday. I am sixteen years old, and will be turning seventeen on September 16, 2004.
Let me first say that I absolutely hated lying to you all, once I started getting to know you, and that I was continually nervous that one of you would figure out that I was missing information or something like that and that you'd hate me. It's not much to say that I didn't know any of you when I started it and so it didn't matter, because it does matter now, and when someone in real life pushed the issue with me, I was actually rather relieved that the stress of lying is over now, and I can talk to you without being afraid of telling the truth. So I didn't want to lie to you. But why did I?
Stupid reason, really. I wanted to join the SBRL yahoo group (and ironically enough, I'm not so much interested in it anymore), only I needed an adult Y!ID. So I made one (and picked May 14th for a birthday only because fourteen was my favorite number and I'd always wanted to be born in May). It wasn't that hard, and tons of underage people do it all the time. But one of the reasons I joined the group was to post the new fics I was writing (also ironically, fics that I cringe at the thought of now). Eventually I wanted to post them other places as well, and once I found FictionAlley, it seemed the perfect archive for me. So I joined. Only, probably very naively, I thought that if I told people my real age (fifteen at the time), I would be kicked out of the SBRL group (would I have? I don't know--all I know is that I was still new enough to the fandom that I didn't want to be forced to leave one of the few places to discuss R/S that I'd found, because even then I loved the pairing so), so I told people I was nineteen. I figured it wouldn't be that hard to pose as a college student, especially when, as a junior, I was encouraged to ask questions and find out as much about college as possible from my parents, teachers, whoever. It wasn't a big deal.
It probably still wouldn't have been a big deal if I hadn't started getting to know some of the people at FictionAlley and the SBRL group, and started considering them friends. And I thought that those tentative friendships, which I already really liked, would be ruined if I revealed that I've been lying about my age, and I didn't want that. I liked you people, and you liked me, and I wanted to get to know you better. Definitely a mistake, because it would make me more likely to slip up, and it would have made things harder when I finally did tell you (damn, it's hard right now!), because I just...didn't want you to hate me. And I got to know you better, and some of you I consider close friends and almost sisters, and I hate disappointing you like this because I choose to lie and keep lying.
I don't know how much you'll trust my word on this, but I promise you that age-related issues were the only things I lied about. I changed my birthday, my age, and my school, and made up a small bit of information as background between how old I am now and how old I was posing as, and that's it. I live in Reno, Nevada, I am a tap dancer, I have a twin sister and a little sister, I do swordfighting, I watch anime and play video games...all of that is real, and really me. The personality behind the posts is still real, and I'm still the person that some of you have talked to--just a little younger than you thought.
I also do not find my real life remarkably deficient in that I had to make up an online persona in order to feel worth something, or any of that junk. I have no problems with being sixteen, except that I am not legally allowed to join adult groups (though I suppose I haven't been acting an adult by lying, have I? *sigh*). I have a good life--I took three AP classes this year, English, US History, and Spanish. Next year I hopefully will be taking a class at UNR (University of Nevada, Reno), along with three more AP classes. My family's very supportive of me, and I love my friends. Problems with my real life are not what drove me to doing this.
The real reason, I think, is that I wanted to try and live without the considerations of being a minor and all that entails. I want to be able to vote (though I couldn't care less about drinking and gambling), and I want to be able to hold an adult discussion and look at things generally considered acceptable only for adults. I have been reading things that could be considered NC17 since I was eleven years old, when my own mother gave me some books containing explicit sexual scenes. And for the most part, my friends in real life (though why we term it that, when you're as real as any of them, I don't know), are uncomfortable discussing some of the things I really like to talk about (such as Remus/Sirius--only one actually likes the pairing, and most of the others don't even like slash), so...I looked online for that discussion, and found it in age-protected groups.
Now that I've come clean, there are two things that really concern me right now. The first is all of your reactions, because I still really don't want you to hate me, and I hope you at least understand. Especially those of you I've talked to personally on IM, and especially the ones I've frequently talked to via IM, I feel like I've really wronged you, and I just hope you forgive me.
But the second one, and the one slightly more worrying to me right now, is FA. I love being an eMentor, and I love being a coder. I don't want to give those up. But I know that this revelation hardly makes me look good, and being as I am in some position of authority, however small it is, I hope this doesn't impact too badly on FA as a whole. I feel terrible, lying to Sabs and Anya for eMentors, and Plu when she was training me for coding. I think that they and Heidi would be fully within their rights to take those privileges away from me, though I sincerely hope they won't, because they're things that I love doing, and things that I've really thrown myself into doing, and I like to think that I've been doing a good job, and I can say now that the revelation of my age is not going to impact the kind of job that I've been doing, except in that I may work harder to try and make up for it. I'll understand if they trust me less, but I just hope that they'll let me stay and try to do my job well to make up for it.
I know I've hurt many of you by lying to you, and some more than others. If anyone wants to defriend me over this, I wouldn't blame you, though I fervently hope that you'll all give me a second chance. I'm not going to delete this journal, or leave the fandom, because while I've been cowardly, I hope that I'm braver now. And I won't lie to you any more.
I still intend to keep writing. My parents don't know, don't want to know, and don't care what I do on the internet, so I will likely keep writing NC17 as well, as well as reading it, which I've been doing for years anyway. Those of you I beta for, and who beta for me, I hope you forgive me and let me continue. I don't know what will happen to my fics at adult archives, but it doesn't matter to me as much right now, not half as much as all of you do.
I'm sincerely sorry I did this. I made a choice, and it was the wrong one, and I regret it. I know that things would have been better for me if I'd been truthful from the beginning, but I very likely wouldn't know all of you, and wouldn't know some of you that I really consider good friends, and while I regret lying, I don't regret getting to know you. And whatever else comes of this post, at least I know that I can tell the truth now, because I hated the lying. And all I can do is hope that you'll forgive me. Maybe I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, but I'd rather do that than make a molehill out of a mountain, and I'm not sure which this would be. It's for you to decide.
If there's anything you would like to discuss with me that I haven't brought up, feel free to email me. I'll reply when my mail decides to let me in.
I hope to remain your friend,
Rynne
