Makali

You know the old saying, "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog"? Well, I'm more of a cat person. Or cat-person, to be precise. It's okay though, I don't really think I'm a cat, not in "real life".

In the real world, we tend to show different sides of ourselves to different people, usually without even thinking about it. At the very least, we usually have work-lives and home-lives, and we're perceived differently by the people in one context of our lives than those from another. We all wear different masks for different people, whether we know it or not.

One of my masks has whiskers and a different name. I was 15 when I first thought Makali up, and I had a lot of fun talking to people through him, but it wasn't just fun, he was a buffer too, a way to feel safe among strangers, and to choose who to allow into my personal life. I think that having an alter-ego really helped me to think about my real identity, and how I approached and thought about other people, too.

But I'm not 15 any more, I'm 30. What's my excuse 15 years later? I still have fun playing Makali. I've changed, and he's changed with me. There turned out to be a whole bunch of other people who pretend they're animals online too, and while (as you might expect) most of them are a bit mental, a few of them are genuinely fantastic people too. I think you have to be pretty open-minded, creative, and freethinking to hang out with people who pretend to be dogs and cats, and foxes and the like, and those are traits I find pretty appealing.