Josephine Emery

I have an interesting relationship with Second Life. As it was coming into being on our screens and people were discovering the joy of being someone/something else I was going through the process of changing my First Life: from man to woman.

There was an avatar calling from within. She had been calling since I was four years old. I had denied her existence all those years, but finally she could stay hidden and formless no longer and insisted upon becoming real.

She had been my Second Life for many years. I had play-acted her life in secret: in the real world. For several days at a time I would be her, and then I would have to switch back to my other Self – the masculine one. The one that society – and my partner – recognised.

For most of my life she had sent me dreams in which my body was already female. It was like there was a mental map, a template, of my Self that was feminine, with all the female bits. But I would wake into a nightmare where everything about my body was male. No wonder I identified so strongly with Kafka’s, ‘Metamorphosis”! Every day I awoke to find that I was not myself. But the dramatic twist to my story was not that my family rejected the monstrous me but that my world, my family, wanted me to stay as the monster. It refused to recognise me in my real form.

In the end, my psyche could no longer tolerate the inner deceit.

And as I revealed myself at work – where I was Director of the Literature Unit – so I also gained my organisation’s support to produce a program of digital story development, called, “The Story of the Future.”

Soon I was encouraging others to develop their Second Life stories. I watched their other lives blossom. I remember one very masculine developer whose Avatar was a man with beautiful wings. “Only women can touch my wings,” he announced. There are some places where people still cannot go in their Second Lives.

I could not attend The Story of the Future’s final residential lab, in a Queensland Resort. As one team was putting the finishing touches to their beautiful Second Life site, ‘Thursday’s Fictions’, I was lying on the operating table for the first of several major surgeries that would reveal to the world my own – till then hidden – reality.

There is much to marvel at when you change your bodily form. Not only does the world respond to you differently, but you discover your own relationship to your Self has altered. You do become a different person. Hidden possibilities emerge as actualities. Having made the hardest of all dreams come true you discover that other dreams are easier to make manifest.

We are energy fields that have, in part, coalesced into flesh. Changing the shape of that flesh does affect how the energy flows. When people have flesh that is part of their inner body map removed they still feel it there. The ‘phantom limb…’ The psyche still tries to map the field as it was.

But for me – and those like me – the ‘phantom limbs’ existed before the scalpel cut our flesh. We were the stone from which the sculptor freed the image of a new body.

So I watch the Second Life avatars in all their Ideal beauty; humans with wings, tails, animal heads, like Egyptian or Islander gods. Avatars that can fly as we do in dreams. And I wonder if manifesting them either prevents their creators from realising their Inner Self in the real world, or whether they are a rehearsal for a new Self and that one day their creators will feel the presence of wing buds, the swish of a tail as they walk, and find that they no longer can fit the old idea of who they were and now must move on.

We are all—man and woman—a process of discovery, of becoming, and of a constant, ever-renewing awareness of the mystery of ourselves.

Josephine Emery