~~ acting as being

So I was thinking about performances. Like, the way I'm self-conscious if I think of my audience on lj, so I can only really write normally (whatever that means) if I pretend no one's listening, and how that influences what I say.... And the whole idea that one can't be fully oneself with other people because one is -always- performing for some sort of audience.... And online personas, right-- how people say they're not like that at all off-line, and how sometimes it could seem that one's online self is diametrically different.

It's horribly inhibiting, to me, actually imagining people's responses -while- I say something, but I think for more extraverted people, that's just normal. They always think of others, and are inhibited as a consequence-- so they might have a desperate need to let go, but it's assumed one can't do that in 'polite society' or whatever. Because to be uninhibited is on some level equivalent to being thoughtless (and rude, vulgar, offensive, etc). Except the internet isn't necessarily 'polite society', depending on whom you ask and where. There's a lot of disagreement on that, isn't there. Regardless, the urge to say what they want to hear or not say anything at all, if I care about their opinion, is almost overwhelming to me. If I don't care about their opinion (meaning, if I don't know them enough to care) then it feels as if I'm being spied upon by some indefinite number of faceless strangers who could be thinking -anything-, and the unknown is a scary concept all by itself unless one blocks it out with the comforting illusion of, for instance, this lj being 'my' space.

I mean, it's really not my space, is it. It's public space, theoretically, since it's publically accessible most of the time, but even so I don't -think- of it as such, which definitely affects how I act. Right now, I am writing only for my benefit. I realize I could get comments, but I usually don't imagine anyone will understand exactly what I mean, necessarily, which is probably why I so often fail to provide context. If I provided context, I'd be performing consciously (rather than unconsciously), which inhibits me to the point of silence.

This is a new concept to me, though I realize it's not actually all that new in general. I don't tend to think of being as an 'act' or an 'action'-- if anything, I resent being judged based on my actions and have always said that what I do isn't really who I am, because I very rarely do what I -really want- (that is, my choices are limited and my energies are focused inward). But being too, is an act. The question isn't really of the inability to judge one based on that act, but rather the presence of full knowledge and context, which is something else again.

( ...Can one even -get- more meta than this...?? )