Honesty & Rage: Part I

So about the whole well-adjusted approach to junior year thing? Yeah, not so much.

I’m beginning to realize that I still have a ton of unresolved anger from the last 365 days and I’m not quite sure how (or if) I should let go of it. So I’m just going to be honest about what is pissing me off, even though nowadays, I’m really vague and impersonal here (obviously, a reason for this, but fuck that). There are two major issues and I’m going to talk about one tonight, leaving the other for another PMS-y evening.

So Sex and the Ivy fucked up my sophomore experience in a lot of ways, but mostly, it came down to the fact that I had little to no privacy even when I was off-line. People were (and still are!) incredibly intrusive, sometimes in extremely disrespectful ways, and I basically broke down from the initial shock of being recognized and approached while going about my daily life at Harvard. I know that it seems like I asked for the attention, putting up a public blog and all, but ask my friends and any reporter who’s ever interviewed me: I already kept an online diary previously and this was just another journal; it wasn’t supposed to blow up the way it did. And though anyone who knows me will agree that I’m totally dramatic, no one will say that I exaggerated the consequences of the website. I definitely wasn’t driven to therapy because it was trendy. I needed it to cope!

Just so you kind of get where I’m coming from, a sampling of what I had to deal with last year:

* Identities of guys being revealed by total strangers who had Facebook-searched them to death.

* Having my personal information repeatedly posted on BoredatLamont.com. Being approached at Lamont. Lacking library-related privacy in general.

* Routinely introducing myself as “Lena” to people who responded with “I know.”

* Getting trash-talked by people who did not know me in front of people who did know me. (Um, hello. I do go to this school. What makes you think I don’t find out about this shit?)

* Being accosted by a drunken idiot at Red Party who followed me and yelled in my face “SEX AND THE IVY. TRUE OR FALSE?” about six times while I tried to escape a post-party mob.

* Being accosted by drunken Yalies at Harvard-Yale.

* Come to think of it, being accosted at parties in general. More or less, every time I went out and was in the presence of alcohol/drunk people.

* Having an actual stalker. (This was basically the low-light of the year.)

* In addition to being called a whore, slut, disgrace to Harvard/Asian/all women; having my family attacked. Like when people make accusations against my father for sexual abuse, because that is clearly the only explanation for my idiosyncrasies.

The fact that I had such a terrible experiences with people disrespecting my privacy means that I became extra paranoid and protective about it. Even now, I still occasionally flip out over privacy issues, though usually no longer my own. As a general rule, I don’t ever use real names on the page, unless the person is a public figure a la Julia or Rachel. I try to treat others’ reputation with as much delicacy as possible, which is why I never “out” anyone, not even the guys who turn out to be assholes deserving of public condemnation. So when I have overzealous readers come up to me and declare that they’ve figured out via random pieces of information that Aidan’s real name is _____ _____, I kind of flip the fuck out. Now granted, Aidan specifically was a lot easier to figure out by virtue of my lack of care in the early blogs, but he’s not the only person whose identity has been compromised. It pisses me off, because I don’t think that who these guys are in real life is that significant. It has no bearing on how people should view my writing or my representation of the relationship. Plus, revealing some identities would actually ruin lives, and it’s ridiculous that there are people curious or malicious enough to dig that deep.

Recently, I was interviewed by a person who I was POSITIVE had an agenda in revealing someone I was previously involved with. It seriously takes something huge to get me riled up nowadays, and this incident left me completely pissed because it wasn’t just my own name on the line. In retrospect, I think I really misjudged the situation, and I probably overreacted (though my friends definitely agreed with me at the time). But I couldn’t help it. We couldn’t help. I’ve been so used to having my privacy routinely disrespected that I automatically assumed the worst.

Along the same lines, I am immediately disinterested in people who are interested in my blog. My social circle has closed in dramatically over the past year because I don’t trust most people, their intentions, or their preconception of me. Considering the number of people I have met from just getting approached, you’d think that I’d be BFFs with a third of the school. The reality is that Rody and a couple sophomores are the only people who have ever made the jump from readers to friends and they happened very early on last fall before the minor breakdown, etc.

This year, I’m totally fine discussing my website and usually gracious about questions, but depending on my mood, I can be more or less receptive to being approached in public. I can understand why someone might want to strike up a convo about my website, but if they don’t know me (or know a good friend of mine who did an introduction), the appropriate forum is email, not coming up to me while I’m grinding with someone on a Saturday night. That’s just really awkward. For both of us.

An example, from this weekend while I was at a party:

Random Guy: “Hey, you’re Lena Chen!”

Me: “Uh, yeah.”

Random Guy: “You had that discussion with that conservative lady, right?”

[me thinking: if by "conservative lady" you mean my friend Janie Fredell, sure!]

Random Guy: “Well, I want you to know that I’m all for your side!”

Me: “That’s … great.”

Random Guy could’ve meant one of two things: 1) he’s all for sex, or 2) he’s all for me having sex. Both of those things are extremely awkward. I don’t need to know either of those things. Thus, the second he left, I turned to my friend (who I had been grinding prior to this awkward exchange) and said: “Got recognized. Night’s over. Time to go!”

Which is a pretty good reflection of how my entire sophomore social experience worked. Got recognized, declared the night over, and went home. See how this whole blog thing might have been a little intrusive upon my college experience?