Just now, I took my last walk around to see if there are any items left to pick up. It doesn’t look quite as bare now as it did right in the beginning, as I left all the copiable trees and plants out, but it does look quite disheveled now, compared to what it has been.

As a way of saying goodbye, I’ve decided to try my hand at machinima-making and created a little memorial movie. Watch and enjoy!

A few days ago, I chatted with a good lady friend who expressed some puzzlement about a newish trend in SL fashion that has become popular in the last year or so. “What’s up with this whole ‘sexy breast thing’?” she said. “It’s like uni-breast. Women are meant to have cleavage, not stuffed peppers!”

I wasn’t quite sure at first what she meant, so when I asked, she replied she was talking about “the skins that have the breasts all pushed tight together. No valley between the mounds!” And she added that she didn’t find that very sexy. She meant those wearables commonly called “cleavage enhancers” of course.

In case you haven’t heard about these things – a cleavage enhancer in SL is a texture typically worn on the undershirt layer which covers the area between the breasts and makes it look as if the breasts are pressed against each other.

I hadn’t really thought about it at the time, so I could only reply vaguely that I do find it sexy sometimes and sometimes not, probably depending on the type of clothing the person wears.

So what do you think? Are cleavage enhancers sexy or not? Opinions on this topic seem to be split in two, if you’ll excuse the pun. After thinking a little more about it, I find myself still sitting firmly on the fence.

One thing that strikes me is that skin designers like Laqroki for example have chosen to offer cleavage enhancers as a separate wearable, but generally do not integrate the “enhanced” shading into their skins themselves, although technically it should be no problem. Why not? My guess is that skin designers (hopefully) know enough about human anatomy to know that female breasts do not look like that by nature. They also seem to have decided that it’s not necessarily desirable at all times for them to look like that.

I’m sticking with my first notion that the difference is made by the type of clothing the person is wearing. You get a clue when you look up the etymology of “enhance” and find out that the original meaning of the word is “lift up” or “raise”. This is quite fitting, because the “enhanced” look is what a woman’s breasts look like when she’s wearing a push-up bra, a corsage or a very tight top.

The main conclusion that a lady of style should draw from this, in my opinion, is that she’s better off without a cleavage enhancer when she’s wearing a loose-fitting top or anything that she wouldn’t combine with a push-up bra in real life.

This is especially evident with very low-cut tops that make it unmistakably obvious that she’s not wearing any bra at all. Combining such a top with a cleavage enhancer will not only put her look firmly into the “Impossible in RL” category, but also give her a distinct flavour of trying too hard. It will no doubt generate some male attention, but not necessarily the type of attention she really wants (nor from the type of male she really likes). For me, it just doesn’t work.

On the other hand, I have to admit I find that with a top that makes it believable, a cleavage enhancer can add some delicious spice to a lady’s neckline.

So, in a nutshell, if you want the guys to stare at your breasts unblinkingly as if they were hypnotized, by all means wear a cleavage enhancer at all times. But if it’s more the passing glance you’re after, maybe lingering appreciatively for a second or two, but then moving on to take an interest in the rest of you, use some discernment.

I’m also very grateful to those venue owners and managers who shoulder a lot of work and expense creating and maintaining the spaces for these musicians to play in, paying the bills, organizing the schedules, placing the ads and event notices etc., right down to being there and giving everyone coming in a friendly welcome. They are doing a great, important job, and I think it’s only right to show them some appreciation by making their tip jars jingle. If you don’t have any L$, even saying thank you will go a long way toward making them feel the whole thing is worth their effort.

Of course, apart from tipping and thanking people, there’s also that more traditional sign of appreciation: applause. I’ve made myself a little gesture for that purpose. It makes my avatar clap his hands for a few seconds, plays an appropriate sound of one person clapping and sends one short line to local chat: “Dylan Rickenbacker claps loudly!”

But here’s the problem. My little gesture makes sense only if it is noticed by the people I’m applauding. And that can be a near impossible task for them or anyone else.

Last night I went to a Carmel Daines gig. She’s a great singer with a really good repertoire of songs. I listened to her first song, and when she finished, I played my clapping gesture. But I never heard my own clapping, and I never got to see my chat line. Instead, the second Carmel ended her song, a Matrix style cascade of lines flooded my screen, too quickly for anyone to read (names have been shortened):

JA: .♥-’`'-. GREAT .-’`'-.♥
JA: GREAT
JA: GREAT ENCORE GREAT
JA: ENCORE
JA:
JA:
KT Claps and Joins Applause
KT: ☆☆ Applause! ☆☆
JA: .♥-’`'-. GREAT .-’`'-.♥
JA: GREAT
JA: GREAT ENCORE GREAT
JA: ENCORE
JA:
JA:
JA: .♥-’`'-. GREAT .-’`'-.♥
JA: GREAT
JA: GREAT ENCORE GREAT
JA: ENCORE
JA:
JA:
JA: .♥-’`'-. GREAT .-’`'-.♥
JA: GREAT
JA: GREAT ENCORE GREAT
JA: ENCORE
JA:
JA:
LR: .-’`'-. APPLAUSE A BIG APPLAUSE .-’`'-.
KT Claps and Joins Applause
KT: ☆☆ Applause! ☆☆
LV: ♫♪♫♪ Applauds♪♫♪♫
JA: .♥-’`'-. GREAT .-’`'-.♥
JA: GREAT
JA: GREAT ENCORE GREAT
JA: ENCORE
JA:
JA:
JJ claps
DR claps loudly!
JA: .♥-’`'-. GREAT .-’`'-.♥
JA: GREAT
JA: GREAT ENCORE GREAT
JA: ENCORE
JA:
JA:
JA: .♥-’`'-. GREAT .-’`'-.♥
JA: GREAT
JA: GREAT ENCORE GREAT
JA: ENCORE
JA:
JA:
RL: coolio
JA: .♥-’`'-. GREAT .-’`'-.♥
JA: GREAT
JA: GREAT ENCORE GREAT
JA: ENCORE
JA:
JA:
LR: .-’`'-. APPLAUSE A BIG APPLAUSE .-’`'-.

Etc. ad lib.

This was accompanied by the sound of a medium-sized football stadium erupting in applause when Robbie Williams appears on the stage.

Now I’m really glad that the lady named JA enjoyed Carmel’s performance. I did too. But the way I understand applause, its purpose is to direct attention to the person receiving the applause, not the one giving it. The wildly over-the-top applause gesture that JA kept playing repeatedly after each song not only drowned out the voices of all others who wanted to show their enjoyment, including mine, but also Carmel’s own voice, because no one could hear what she was saying in between songs.

And not only in between songs. When I first joined SL, it was widely considered good form to limit local chat during musical performances to an absolute minimum and, if you absolutely had to say something, to precede it with a slash so no typing sound would be heard. This kind of restraint seems to have gone out of fashion. People are not only chatting away but even playing sound gestures during the songs.

I don’t know about you, but I feel that this type of behaviour has nothing to do with applause. It is uncivilised, it is disruptive, and people who do it should be banned from the venues. The first venue owner I see doing that will have 10 times the usual tip from me.

Thanks to Velveeta Biedermann for the picture

Sumar had been active in other virtual worlds even before coming to SL in May 2004, so she had a wealth of experience that she generously shared with others right from the beginning. When The Shelter was founded a few months later, her passion for teaching and guiding became part of its mission.

By the time I came to SL in October 2006, Sumar was a formidable figure at the Shelter, the Grande Dame who by her mere presence deflected any attempts to turn the place even temporarily into the kind of sleazy, cussing, griefing-infested club that was so often found in SL. At the same time, she did what she had always done – pouring out landmarks, freebies, information and advice from her cornucopia of experience on each and every newbie who, like me, stumbled into the Shelter, glad to have found a secure foothold in this overwhelming, confusing new world. At the time, Sumar and Onionpencil were the Shelter fixtures who personified that foothold.

It seems ironic and somewhat unjust, from today’s perspective, that Sumar was sometimes faced with criticisms of being too strict in terms of keeping The Shelter a clean, safe place. After I had become a Shelter Volunteer myself a little later, I found myself at times siding with those who advocated a more relaxed approach. So I had my disagreements with Sumar, as will happen in any organization where people from widely different backgrounds are working together. It shames me to say that I haven’t always been as kind and respectful in expressing them as I should have been.

But in time, she taught me to respect her greatly through the sheer generosity of her forgiveness. She wasn’t one to hold a grudge, and whenever I came to her to apologize, she shook the past off her shoulders and made reconciliation with such ease and grace that it was a refreshing relief. To this generosity of spirit I owe the fact that I was finally numbered among her friends.

In September 2008, when it became known that she had been diagnosed with cancer, she took it as another opportunity to inspire deep respect in all who knew her. She took up the challenge with an indomitable spirit. She knew the disease might win in the end, but she was not going to give in without a fight, and she was not going to let it take away her dignity. Above all, her faith gave her the assurance that even if she might be defeated, it wouldn’t be the final word.

Her battle with cancer forced her to gradually fade out of the day-to-day affairs at the Shelter. The last time I talked with her, back in February, she was in great spirits, joking about the short white fuzz that desperately tried to grow back on her head after radiation. She was full of optimism that she had beaten this thing. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be.

I know that Sumar was fond of the works of British writer C. S. Lewis. When his wife died of cancer in 1960, he wrote an epitaph for her that I think is fitting for Sumar, too:

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,

And field, and forest, as they were

Reflected in a single mind)

Like cast off clothes was left behind

In ashes, yet with hopes that she,

Re-born from holy poverty,

In lenten lands, hereafter may

Resume them on her Easter Day.

I had a great, relaxing time with some fascinating new experiences, almost never wearing shoes (other than flip-flops), going everywhere on my bicycle, feasting on seafood, reading loads of great books, tumbling about in the surf, and best of all, taking some kite-surfing lessons. What fun! Not that I’ve mastered the art yet, but I’m not going to rest until I can do it properly.

It felt weird logging on to SL for the first time after my return. The first weird thing was that I waited a whole day before I did, not because I was making a deliberate effort to exercise restraint, but just because there were all sorts of other things to do and I just didn’t feel like it.

When I finally did log on on Monday, I noticed that it felt different. My main interest was getting in touch with my friends, and I found my attention was all focussed on IMs and chat, to the point that I hardly looked at the visuals. One symptom of this is that Dylan is still wearing the same clothes he had on when I left three weeks ago. Somehow, I can’t be bothered to change. I said to a friend that SL doesn’t seem to feel as immersive to me as it used to – she thought that is a good sign, considering my history. Maybe she’s right.

At least, I didn’t log on on Tuesday either – the weather was too nice, so I preferred being out in the garden, battling my old enemy, the bamboo. (Did I ever mention that the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was shot in my garden?)

Off now to go swimming.

There’s hustle and bustle everywhere in the house; everyone is busy packing and taking care of all sorts of last minute stuff. I’m done already, waiting for my next job, which will be to load up the car and mount the bike rack.

After having kept my promise and posted that story which I’d been procrastinating on for a year, I can go off for three weeks without a worry in my mind. See you on the flip side!

The day I posted Part III of this series last week, some time later in the afternoon, I was in SL, dancing at the Shelter, when suddenly my internet connection died. After I’d rounded up the usual suspects – reset the router, restarted the computer – it became clear that the problem was not on my end but my provider’s. I briefly considered calling the hotline, but then just shrugged, grabbed my guitar, played a bit, then went upstairs and took my dog for a walk. By the time I got back it was time for dinner. After the meal, my daughter wanted to watch a movie on tv, so I flopped beside her on the couch and watched “You’ve Got Mail” with her. After the movie, I came downstairs again to check whether my internet was back. It was, and had been for quite some time obviously, as my email program had been diligently downloading my mail every 15 minutes for a couple of hours or so. I went through my mail quickly, then switched the computer off and went to bed.

Why am I telling you this humdrum stuff? Well, as I lay there dozing off, it occurred to me that it wasn’t humdrum at all. It was really quite extraordinary, compared to what I would have done if such a thing had happened to me, say, one and a half years ago. Back then, I would have been on the phone right away, telling some poor guy or girl at my provider’s hotline how absolutely essential it was that they got their servers up and functional again this very minute. Then, I would have just sat there and checked every 30 seconds or so whether my connection was back up. As I would have been biting my nails all that time, playing my guitar wouldn’t have been an option. The second I would have been able to log on again, I would have been back in SL and stayed there until they called me to dinner, and afterwards my daughter would have been alone with Meg and Tom. I wouldn’t have gone to bed at such a reasonable hour either.

I think I’m becoming addicted again – addicted to pleasurable moments like that when I realize that there’s a quantum of freedom in my life now. Moments when I realize that I like being me again. Moments when SL is one of several options for using my time and I decide to do something else, not because I think I should, but because I just feel like it.

I wish I could give you some recipe, some fail-safe method for getting there, but I can’t. In my case, it looks as if this storm I went through just had to run its course. It’s true that I took certain measures to get my life back on track, but I honestly don’t know whether it would have been possible for me to do so much earlier, as much as I wish I would have. Still, maybe you’ll find a clue or two for yourself in my story.

Around the end of 2007, I was at the absolute low point in every area of my life. Everything looked hopeless. I knew we would have to negotiate a new mortgage for our house in the first half of 2008, and given the shape our finances were in, the prospect of losing the house loomed large. I knew that my wife, though she didn’t talk much about it, was inwardly thinking about how she would rearrange her life after our marriage was over, which she expected to happen within a year. My professional standing was nearly destroyed – several publishing dates had had to be postponed because I hadn’t delivered the copy on schedule. The publishers weren’t happy with me, and their patience was running out.

Killing that life insurance took a bit of pressure off the cooker I was in. The money didn’t take us all the way back into the black, but at least we were operational again for the time being. The threat of losing the house was pushed back, and we were able to make tentative plans for going on vacation that coming summer.

That vacation was my deadline. Things had to change by then. If I didn’t catch up on my work backlog by then, not only the vacation wouldn’t be happening, but my professional life would be over. If I couldn’t give my wife some reason to put new faith in our marriage by then, it would be over, too. Of course, I would have to find some new faith in our marriage myself first.

Believe it or not, even then going cold turkey on SL entirely wasn’t an option I could seriously think about. I just couldn’t face it. I saw a therapist a couple of times in early 2008, and his way of summing up our talks was to say that I didn’t know anything about where I wanted my life to go, except that I wanted to hold on to SL.

Honestly, if cold turkey had been my only chance, I don’t think I would have made it through. I admire people who, at the height of their addiction, are able to pull the plug and leave SL totally. I think it’s a truly heroic deed. I wouldn’t have been up to it.

Interestingly, in the aforementioned Handbook of Psychotherapy, I had read that, contrary to other addictions like alcohol for example, going cold turkey isn’t necessarily the recommended course of action in the case of an internet-related addiction. One of the reasons was, if I remember correctly, that you can’t effectively put the “drug” out of your reach if living without a computer or internet access entirely isn’t an option. That was certainly true in my case. I spend my whole day at the computer, and I need the internet for my work. Had I gone cold turkey, relapse would have been only a mouse-click away every single second of my working day. The odds against that going well for very long would have been just too high. So I didn’t make any heroic decisions. I thought I’d be much safer if I could find a way to live with SL without it sucking up all my RL.

The Handbook had other practical bits of advice for internet addicts, though, such as not upgrading your computer to accommodate your on-line games, setting alarm clocks etc. It was too late for me not to upgrade, and I had tried the alarm clock thing with unimpressive results. In my experience, an alarm clock can be a good aid, but it won’t help much if you just set arbitrary times. You need specific objectives that give you a purpose for which you set your clock.

For me, in a nutshell, it came down to focusing on the positive instead of the negative. In other words, focusing positively on doing things, such as completing a specific amount of work, helped me more than focusing negatively on not being in SL. So when you set an alarm, do it not to stop being in SL, but to start doing some specific other thing. That other thing very often was work in my case of course, but it was just as important for me to deliberately make room for things I used to like doing in my spare time, such as reading, watching movies, playing the guitar etc.

From about March to mid-July 2008, I had one specific goal to focus on. I had to get out from under those deadlines. I had to complete these long overdue projects by July 11 – the day before we were planning to leave for the island – or I would have lost the game. There was no room for negotiation anymore, not with my publishers, not with my wife. So it was sheer pressure that forced me to get down and tackle the work. It cost me enormous energy because I hadn’t really found a livable way to fit SL into my life yet, so I just slaved away while RL and SL dragged me in opposite directions. Nothing had really changed yet. I just did the work because finally I really had no other choice left.

But something did change while I was at it. When I buckled down and started to do the work, my confidence that I would be able to do it was zero. Then, page by page, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, it slowly dawned on me that I could. It nearly killed me, but I was making progress. After a while, reaching the goal didn’t look like a wild wishful fantasy anymore. It began to look as if I might just make it. Gradually, slowly, I began to believe it.

Some time in April, an old friend took me to see James Taylor on stage in Frankfurt. The concert was great, but our talk during the one hour drive from his place to Frankfurt, over the meal we had afterwards and during the drive back was even better, though it didn’t quite seem so at the time. It was basically me letting off steam and him listening. I was playing my own devil’s advocate and told him all the things that I found frustrating in my marriage and all the reasons why I thought I wanted out of it. The poor fellow must have found it all terribly depressing. After we’d said goodbye in front of his house, it was another one and a half hours’ drive home for me. Alone in my car, a calm came over me after the rage. I can’t really explain it. Somehow all the negative things I’d been saying to him about my marriage suddenly seemed strangely inconsequential to me. By the time I crawled into bed in the dark early hours next to my wife who had been my companion for more than 25 years now, I had stopped doubting. This was something worth saving. It was worth making an effort. She deserved giving our marriage my best shot, even if my best shot right now might turn out to be a dud. I knew now that I was going to try.

July 11 came, and I had made my deadline by the skin of my teeth. I cannot describe the relief I felt while we were rolling north toward the coast. Three weeks on the beach lay ahead of me, the pressure that had become my constant companion was finally off. My wife seemed to have noticed that the wheel had begun to turn. She’d started to believe in us again. Of course, there would be no SL for 3 weeks either. I was amazed when I realized that this didn’t bother me at all. I still didn’t want to give SL up, but staying away from it for a while was not such a scary prospect anymore. SL wouldn’t be going away while I was gone, after all. And afterwards, when we got back, I would be able to make a new start with a clean slate.

During the vacation, I made two small but important decisions regarding the way I would re-order my daily routine after my return. They sound ridiculously simple, and maybe they are. The first had to do with my realization that one of the things that had caused me to want to escape from RL had been exhaustion. So I decided to lower the bar a bit. I reduced my daily quota a little. Not much, just a notch. But that notch made the difference between just a bit too much every day, which translated into a burnout over the long haul, and a very manageable amount of work. The other decision was that I would no longer log on to SL first thing in the morning. I set myself a rule: no SL or other distractions until I had done at least half of my quota. This sounds like a no-brainer, and indeed the idea wasn’t new, but now I saw a chance to actually stick to it.

I can’t claim a perfect score, but on the whole, I kept the rule. My work got done every day, and within weeks, it even got done in such good time that I had plenty of time left for other things. Boy, did that feel good! Being in charge of my life again after feeling powerless for so long was one of the best experiences I ever had. And it’s still a great feeling, even after I got used to it. Within months, our bank account showed distinct signs of recovery, too. And the depressing cloud that had lain over our marriage for so long gradually dissolved. After a year, it now seems like a bad dream.

I still don’t want to leave SL, although the thought of leaving isn’t really scary anymore. What keeps me there is my friends, especially my best friend Renn and all the wonderful, crazy people at the Shelter, my beautiful home at Kingfisher Island, and the playful creativity. But it no longer feels as if my identity is bound up with it. Dylan is here with me now, so I can be whole without SL.

I don’t make jokes about RL anymore though.

I’d like to end this posting and this series by sharing a song lyric that sums up how I approach every day nowadays and which I hope will be an encouragement for you. I’m not sure who wrote the song; there are several versions of it around, but I first encountered it in Tommy Emmanuel’s beautiful a cappella version. It’s called “Today Is Mine”.

When the sun came up this morning I took the time to watch it rise.
As its beauty struck the darkness from the skies.
I thought how small and unimportant all my troubles seem to be,
and how lucky another day belongs to me.

And as the sleepy world around me woke up to greet the day,
and all its silent beauty seemed to say:
So what, my friend, if all your dreams you haven’t realized.
Look around, you got a whole new day to try.

Today is mine, today is mine, to do with what I will.
Today is mine. My own special cup to fill.
To die a little that I might learn to live.
And take from life that I might learn to give.
Today is mine.

With all men I curse the present that seems void of peace of mind,
and race my thoughts beyond tomorrow, envision there more peace of mind.
But when I view the day around me I can see the fool I’ve been.
For today is the only garden we can tend.

Today is mine, today is mine, to do with what I will.
Today is mine. My own special cup to fill.
To die a little that I might learn to live.
And take from life that I might learn to give.
Today is mine.

So it was time to take stock. What had my Second Life cost me? What had I received in return? Had it been worth it?

The most obvious loss was the financial one. 2007 was the year in which I felt the full impact of my addiction from beginning to end. When I tally up how much money I lost in that year alone by not working properly, the bottom line is a five-digit sum in Euros, and I’m afraid the first digit is not a one. Add to that the last three months of 2006 and about the first two or three of 2008, and I’m getting close to 30,000 € before taxes. Maybe more.

If someone had shown me that number in early October 2006 and told me that was what I was going to pay for that “free account” I was about to open, I would have thought only a madman could do something like that.

And that’s only a number. Hidden behind that number are some of the most humiliating and devastating moments of my life, starting with the moment I had to confess to my wife that there was no money coming in because I had been slacking for months. The moment I had to tell the people at the tax office that I couldn’t pay my taxes after their regular direct debit had been returned by my bank because of insufficient funds. The moment I had to explain to my children that we weren’t going to go on vacation in the summer of 2007. The moment I sat in my bank manager’s office telling him I had been going through some difficult times, but things were going to get better now. The moment things hadn’t gotten better after all and the tax office finally lost their patience with me and blocked my bank account. The moment I shook the hand of the bailiff on my doorstep. Then, in December 2007, came that final humiliating phone conversation with an insurance employee in which I had to insist that I really, really had no choice but to cancel my life insurance which was the centerpiece of my old age pension scheme while he was trying to be helpful and made all sorts of alternative suggestions which couldn’t work for me for reasons I didn’t want to explain to him.

It wasn’t just that I didn’t work, you see. I also didn’t open any letters if they looked like they might contain some official business or a bill or something. All my affairs were in a state of total chaos. And the worse it got, the more apathetic I became and the more I escaped to SL where I didn’t seem to have to feel all those negative emotions.

The second big loss was a little more than one year of my marriage. I was lucky enough not to lose it permanently in the end, but for about fourteen months or so, it wasn’t really a marriage. One side of it was that my wife was despairing over my lack of responsibility and the financial mess we were in and on the brink of giving up on me. For a time, she had given up, I think. And of course she couldn’t help noticing that my whole emotional life was happening elsewhere. She never knew any details of what I was doing in SL, but the outcome of it all was that I had withdrawn from her, and she knew that all too well. Sometimes she had hope that all this would change, other times she didn’t. What kept our marriage together during those times when she didn’t was just the thin thread of the circumstances. Had we been living in a rented flat without kids, I’m sure I would have found my suitcase on the landing one day outside the door equipped with a new lock.

The other side was that for a while, I didn’t feel any motivation to save my marriage. There were moments when I was secretly hoping she would throw me out. I mentioned earlier that I had buried inside myself a feeling of being trapped, and one of the things I felt trapped by, as grossly unfair as that sounds, was my marriage. That feeling broke loose from its hidden depth with the fury of a volcano when I came to SL. In her comment on Part II, my friend Riall hinted she was going through something similar and said SL was just an “accomplice” in that, which certainly was true in my case. I tended to use the word catalyst when I thought about it. Those destructive forces didn’t come from SL, they came from deep inside myself, and SL was just the tremor that shook the rock cover from the hidden magma chamber.

I say destructive. I had a friend in SL who tried her best to convince me that those forces were really liberating, not destructive. For a while I was really torn between those two ways of looking at it. From where I was, there seemed to be two roads into the future in terms of my marriage, breaking out or hanging in there and trying to make it work, and for a while I really couldn’t tell which would be the better one. Each one seemed to involve throwing away a whole world of possibilities. Today I think it probably was both – liberating and destructive. It was a good thing that these feelings broke loose, because otherwise I might never have been forced to face them and deal with them. But I’m really glad that their fury was contained. My choice in the end was not so much about which road seemed to promise more satisfaction for me as about what sort of person I wanted to be. Ironically, taking that road is proving to be a very satisfying thing.

That brings me to the third big loss – the way I felt about myself. The way things were, I couldn’t be good at anything in RL anymore. I couldn’t work, I couldn’t provide for my family, I couldn’t take care of my affairs, I couldn’t be a good husband, I couldn’t be a good father. I was a total failure. I felt dirty, powerless, worthless. I don’t think I was really suicidal, but I was thinking a lot about suicide in those days – I didn’t talk about it or make plans or even seriously wish for it or anything, but I thought about it. I saw possible scenarios in my mind. Meanwhile, old Dylan in SL was successful, charming, popular. True to my propensity to pursue good feelings and avoid negative ones, these feelings drove me more and more to prefer SL to RL. And so the spiral kept turning…

There were other losses, too. That summer vacation in 2007 that we had to cancel. I wasn’t reading books anymore. I wasn’t playing the guitar anymore. I wasn’t going to the movies anymore. I’d given up the volunteer work in my church, which I had been very committed to before I came to SL. My whole spiritual life took a major hit which it still hasn’t recovered from. As I wasn’t even doing my work, any thought of pursuing my own writing seemed ridiculously out of reach. It seemed as if my life was reduced to feeding this body, keeping it reasonably clean and grudgingly granting it a minimum of sleep, all in order to drop it in front of the computer again as soon as possible so I could let my soul be sucked into the colourful pixel world.

In view of this huge price I paid for my SL, you may be wondering why I would even ask the question whether it was worth it. How could anything be worth paying such a price? But it won’t do to act as if SL had given me nothing in return. After all, there are people who are paying a similar price for nothing but drunken stupor. Compared to that, I certainly got a better deal.

First of all I met a lot of wonderful people in SL, and with some of them I feel I have formed lasting friendships. You can’t put a price tag on that. Then, SL gave me opportunities to playfully pursue creative activities – like making animations, working with textures and pictures, building, scripting, writing this blog – that I would probably never have thought of without SL. And above all, SL taught me a lot about myself that I didn’t know. As I’ve said before, becoming Dylan brought things about myself to the surface that I never thought were in me. The impact of it could easily have been my undoing, but nevertheless, I couldn’t ever wish these things would have stayed buried inside me.

Maybe asking in hindsight whether it was worth it is the wrong question after all. It’s not as if I ever made a choice to pay that price, knowing what I would get in return. This is just how it played out. A lot of it was my doing, some of it wasn’t. Many things I do regret, some things I don’t. I had to grieve these losses like you grieve the loss of a loved one. Then my next task was to translate the question into the present moment: Is what I’m doing right now in SL worth “losing” what I could or should be doing in RL right now? And the task was to bring Dylan back into my RL. All the things about me he had brought to the surface – they weren’t going to be any use to me if they stayed sealed off in SL. In a nutshell, I had to find a way to make SL work for me instead of against me.

(Concluding in Part IV: A Quantum of Freedom.)

So I sat down and wrote some goodbye notes to my closest friends in SL. I imagine writing a suicide note must feel a bit like that. I’d met some people during those few months who had become really good pals, and in some cases I became aware just how dear they had become to me only while I was writing those notes. It was a harrowing experience.

At that time, I was in a very close relationship with a lady. The particular nature of that relationship added greatly to my feeling that I wasn’t in control of things anymore (as if I had ever been!) and that I needed to break free.

She was living in Northern Europe, so we were both in the same time zone. She worked for a big IT company, but she called in sick quite frequently, often spending weeks off work, because she was suffering from severe stress symptoms at the time. So she was both going through a very vulnerable time in her life and often had plenty of time on her hands during the day. She also had some RL contact information, so she could reach me even when I wasn’t in SL for a change.

The result was that even on those days when I made some effort to stay out of SL and do my work instead, most of the time I would receive a message from her sooner or later, letting me know that she was feeling awful and needed my company. Usually I ended up logging on and spending time with her – way more time than I could afford of course. I didn’t feel like I had any choice in the matter.

When I told her I had decided to take a break from SL and didn’t know when I would be back, she was dissolving in a pool of tears. I felt awful for having to do that to her. I didn’t want to hurt her, but again, I felt as if I had no choice.

When I logged off to enter my hiatus, I did hope I would be able to come back one day, but I thought it was highly doubtful. I saw myself at the beginning of a long uphill hike to get my work habits back on track, to catch up on my deadlines and to regain some lost ground financially. Furthermore, I knew I shouldn’t go back unless I established some firm ground rules for keeping a better balance and could trust myself to stick to them. With all these provisos, I thought my return to SL was a long way off, if it ever happened at all.

Then a funny thing happened. On Yahoo, I still talked every day to my lady friend who had been so heartbroken over my departure. She stayed heartbroken for about three days. On the fourth day, I heard nothing from her. On the fifth day, she sent me a message to tell me she had found a new boyfriend.

I was dumbfounded. I hadn’t been in SL long enough yet to know that the lightning speed with which she had recuperated from her bottomless misery was nothing out of the ordinary in the virtual world. I thought it was just amazing.

The immediate effect the news had on me was that I thought I could go back without danger. I know now that I was kidding myself, but at the time I was all too ready to believe in the convenient fiction that all my troubles had been solely due to the nature of my relationship with that lady. Now that problem had taken care of itself, so I thought I was safe.

So I was back barely a week after I had pompously announced my departure. I’m not sure, but it may be that I even managed to work regularly for a few weeks or so, just long enough to lull me into believing I had the thing under control.

By February, though, the old pattern had taken over again. SL spread out more and more in my life, filling not only my days, but my head and my heart, too. I paid a perfunctory tribute of attention to my wife, my kids and, to a lesser degree, my work, but my thoughts and my passions were elsewhere. I had lost my taste for RL.

I’ve often wondered how this could happen to me. How was it possible that a virtual world could get such a hold on me? I wasn’t aware that my RL was so miserable that I had no choice but escaping from it. But why then had it lost all colour for me, so that I fled to the visual candy world of SL whenever I thought no one was watching me?

By and by, I found a few answers to these questions. One important clue was that a similar thing had happened to me a few years ago. At that time, my son, who was then nine years old, became very ill and had to have the sort of surgery that is covered in long articles in international medical journals afterwards. He spent several months in hospital.

That summer, I did hardly any work. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the time; usually my wife visited my son during the day, leaving the evenings to me, so I didn’t really have an excuse. But I didn’t work. SL wasn’t around yet at the time, but I found all sorts of other things to do; I don’t even remember what I did. Play Tetris, most likely, and a variety of other mindless things. Afterwards, I told myself I was going through some sort of depression. Whatever it was, I couldn’t muster up the energy to do my work, and I basically anaesthetized myself every way I could, both against the fear for my son and the pangs of my conscience.

But that had been years ago. My son was fine now, and so was everyone else in my family. In fact, I thought I was a reasonably happy man when I first logged on to SL. So what was it that made the virtual world – and my own self in the virtual world – so much more attractive to me than my real everyday life?

When I thought about this, I came up with some clues. I don’t want to go into too many details lest this blog entry become even more interminable than it already is, but they have to do with exhaustion, with professional goals I had failed to achieve, and with a general feeling of being trapped, of not being the one who was in charge of the direction of my life. Maybe it all comes down to the fact that I was fourty-six years old when I first came to SL – just the right time for a nice little midlife crisis. Although I think you can feel exhausted and frustrated with things at any time of your life.

The point is, though, that by becoming Dylan, I felt as if I could get away from all that; literally slip into a new skin and a new life and be free to find out who I really was and what I really wanted to do. And that was, at that time in my life, an overwhelmingly attractive prospect.

Another clue I found was in the fall of 2007 when I was at the Frankfurt Book Fair. While I made my rounds there, I spotted a book called Handbook of Psychotherapy at one of the exhibition stands. When I browsed through it, I found a chapter on internet addiction. Naturally, I pulled up a chair and started to read.

It was a bit of an eye-opener. I had long suspected that my SL addiction had a chemical aspect because being in SL felt like a permanent high to me. Of course, it’s common knowledge that whenever you find pleasure in something, there’s a neurochemical correlation that makes the „pleasure center“ in your brain „light up“. Obviously, there’s also the sexual arousal aspect with its increased hormone levels that could conceivably lead to a chemical dependency. (Conventional wisdom has it that men are more prone to react in that way to visual stimuli than women, but judging from my experiences in SL, I have my doubts about that.)

The new thing Iearned from the Handbook of Psychotherapy was the conditioning that takes place in connection with these chemical processes. Conditioning basically means that the brain loves to associate things. So when you regularly do things with your computer that give you sexual pleasure, for example, such as logging on to SL and being surrounded by beautiful, scantily clad avatars, your brain sort of groups your computer in the same category as the sexual pleasure. The result is that even the sound of your computer booting up might be enough to kick your glands into gear and get the juices flowing, as it were.

That explained to me why SL always seemed to give me a kick, even when I was alone on my sky platform building things or scripting. That low-level arousal I felt all the time I spent in SL certainly produced a sort of substance addiction that was one of the factors that kept me hooked.

The good news is that this effect does wear off a bit when you become conscious of it. Some brain scientists try to tell us that our brain chemistry is all that we are, but ironically, it is precisely when we become aware of the chemical nature of a certain reaction we feel that we can rise above it, as it were, and discover that beyond our brain chemistry, there is such a thing as „I“ that can make itself master of that reaction. „I“ may not be able to turn it off, but I can decide what to do with it, and that makes the compulsion I feel suddenly much less compelling.

But let’s not rush ahead. For the time being, I was still a miserable SLunkie, and would remain so for a while. Still, it may be that it was this discovery that created in me that tiny space of self-determination that allowed me in the following months to take an honest look at what SL had done to me.

(Continuing in Part III: Losses and Gains.)