I have a confession to make, and I tremble in the making of it because some of you will doubtless consider me beyond the pale. There is one almost-golden rule in most internet fora that should not be broken. Reader, I have broken this rule many times and I will explain to you why.

RULE: If you post something do not delete it, do not disable comments, you MUST allow other people the freedom to rebut your opinions or else you close the doors to ALL discussion.

I think this is a good rule, to be sure, because how could anyone have a discussion if people were always just posting OPs and running away?

When I started using the internet in the `90s, I was fairly active on more than one online community. I would religiously answer every response, have long arguments that dragged for hours until I would turn up in class all beady eyed and migrain-y in the morning. I was being a Good Netizen. I was contributing to discussions, see.

Naturally, the fate of the world hung upon our resolving our online conflicts.

I’m not saying it was a bad thing. It was the `90s, my interlocutors were often quite intelligent and I was young, with more energy. This means that sparring was invigorating even if it probably brought my blood pressure up.

But there were things I could live without. The constant anxiety of negative feedback, the trollings, the unnecessary shit-storms over trivial things, people who were cruel just to be cool. I am sure it was all good fun for some of them, and so I wish them well. But there are others, some of us, who live in constant energy debt, for whom these train-wrecks are not fun. There are some of us for whom every interaction comes at a cost – and we can explain this until the cows come home, but someone or other will say we’re making excuses.

I have learned a lot from reading the blog of the poet Shweta Narayan, but one of the things I learned from her blog that directly affected me because it gave me a way to articulate my own state of perpetual exhaustion was this: Christine Miserandino’s The Spoon Theory. Now, the post was written for those who have Lupus, but there are different people with different reasons for what I call The Exhaustion. We could, for instance, be juggling multiple medication for diabetes, hypertension, or we could be highly strung, deeply introverted creative individuals. Some of us may have thyroid problems (not me, whew!). Or perhaps we just don’t have the energy to have involved debates.

In all of these cases it boils down, to me, to an equation (I’m not a mathematician so I am sure all of this can be done up far more elegantly):

Responding to remarks + nervousness & anxiety about said response + nervousness and overthinking about my response to said responses + time spent on all of the above = x*y

In which: x = Units which add up to years of my life
y = Units worth of Ninnergy

x *y = z

In which: z= Amount of fiction, poetry and academic writing that could have been produced

Conclusion: EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!

This is how posts I make rashly get deleted. This is how I beat a hasty retreat in more than one instance.

Granted, I do get angry at myself at every one of these instances for

(1) Posting in the first place.
(2) Deleting because of a deep awareness of this transgression of Netiquette.

But in the long run? I’d rather sleep nights, folks. I’d rather write things that matter.

And so, I avoid online forums mostly, and avoid posting on other people’s pages or blogs – but every now and then this transgression might happen when I am all eager-beaver in a very typical Ninny way. And sometimes this happens with Nin-shorthand. And it can lead to funny misunderstandings.

Some of you know this and know me well, and I am incredibly lucky in that respect to have this.

But I have witnessed, on other communities, the lynching of people who have done exactly the same thing I have done. Post, then delete and run, after heaps of people take to spam-hate-bombing them. They then wonder why the person concerned was so upset they would commit such an act. How dare the person not allow them to vent their bile on the person for such a post! Because of course, if you put something out there, you must put up with the flak, must expand x*y to atone for the mistake you’ve made. If you don’t do any of these things, then there must be Something Terribly Wrong With You.

I have to admit it guys. I’m old. I am all for freedom of speech, freedom of the internet etc – witness my blackouts on the other domains. But I also am for the freedom of people to express an opinion without being heckled or insulted. I do not think I owe anyone anything. I do not have to stand with my head bowed, to listen to them tell me how wrong I am when I could be using that time more fruitfully. I do not think that just because I put myself “out there” as a blogger etc, that it should turn me into an open target. I feel the same way about public figures, writers that I read/admire etc. I think they are entitled to their private lives. They are entitled not to engage or to engage as they will.

I’d rather preserve my x*y, folks. It may mean I’m an incredibly selfish person, but x*y is important.