"Stablegirl??
What does THAT
mean?"
On my original bio page, I gave a very brief explanation of my
unusual nickname: "The nickname started as a joke in an RPG/'shared universe' story
on Prodigy back in 1991- an attempt at sarcasm that backfired and is likely to
haunt her to the end of her days." But that flippant comment doesn't tell the
whole story, nor does it indicate the considerable significance of the story as it
relates to my life. So that's what I'm going to do here, for those who may be
curious...
I got online, via Prodigy, in 1991 after receiving a computer
as a high-school graduation present. At that point in my life I was horribly shy.
Writing was the only form of communication I was comfortable with, and it was only
when I was writing that I had any confidence in myself. That's why I immediately
fell in love with e- mail and bulletin boards. Online, I could develop and display
the personality that I'd never been able to evince in "real life."
Later that year, that personality came to life in the form of
Missy the Stablegirl.
"Missy" was created in response to a request for characters to
populate a fantasy world called Calador. I'd watched the bulletin board for a few days
as others described their characters-- kings, princesses, warriors, mages, etc..
All wonderful, interesting characters, and I don't in any way mean to disparage
their creators. But even a fantasy world can't exist without "real people", and so
I decided to tease them a little by creating the most common, lowly character I
could think of-- the poorer-than-poor young stablehand, Missy.
In physical appearance, Missy was me. In personality, she was
what I wanted to be-- friendly, funny, outgoing, confident, even popular. And through
her I could say and do all of the things I'd always wanted to say and do, the
things I'd thus far only been able to write about in stories. But this was vastly
superior to writing a story of my own, for on the other side of each character in
this world there was a real person who was responding to me, interacting with me.
That interaction became the most important thing in my life.
Yes, I was that obsessed with it. In addition to the shyness
problem, I'd recently lost my grandmother to cancer, my mother was battling the same
form of cancer, and I was struggling to come to terms with a chronic illness of my
own. In short, it was a really rotten time in my life. Missy literally gave me the
escape hatch I needed to protect my sanity-- she was me, but she had none of my
problems, none of my fears. Nothing really bad could ever happen to her unless I
allowed it. I had no control over my own life, but I at least had control over
hers. It was better than nothing.
Perhaps the realism behind the character helped me to portray
her better, for she soon became quite popular. Other writers began including her in
their storylines, and even people on other boards had heard tales of "The
Stablegirl" and her adventures-- adventures no peasant girl had any right to have.
What other stablehand has ever become the confidante of a king, been befriended by
a princess, been kidnapped by a sorceror and held for ransom, become the ladylove
of a time-travelling prince, and had a kingdom rally to make her heir to the
throne? :)
And just as Missy came to love those characters, I came to love
the people behind them. With hours upon hours of written communication, both within the
story and outside of it, we came to know one another as well as any "real" friends do.
True, we couldn't see or hear one another, but we could do the things that were really
important-- we could support and encourage one another, we could "listen" to problems
and offer advice, and we could just be silly and have a good time together. But
most of all, we could all know that, however lonely we felt, there were people in
the world who cared. I'll never again underestimate the importance of that...
So the story went on. New characters came in and old ones
dropped out, but there was a core of characters who stayed throughout. In some cases, I
believe that that daily interaction was just as much of a lifeline for them as it was
for me. We needed one another.
And eventually a strange thing started to happen. My two
selves, the real one and the fiction one, began to merge. The personality and self-
confidence I had online began to show itself in my real-life interactions. It was a
subtle change, but eventually I found myself initiating conversations with
strangers at school and taking active part in class discussions. I joined student
organizations, ran for office, and won. And I even, wonder of wonders, started
getting attention from men. In a very real sense, Missy the Stablegirl had stepped
out of Calador and into Fort Worth, Texas, and she changed my life forever.
As for the story, it was inevitable that it would end
eventually. In late 1993, when Prodigy started charging by the hour, the inevitable
became the immediate. As term memberships expired, characters and writers said
their farewells. (At that time Prodigy was a closed network, so there was no way to
keep in touch via e-mail once a member left the service.) Those of us who were left
in the end sadly wrote of Calador's demise and promised one another that we'd
resurrect it someday.
But time has a way of changing things, especially when you're
young. Some of us kept in touch via snailmail and, later, through e-mail again. Nearly
all of us had stayed online in some form or another, so it wasn't too difficult to
track one another down once the Internet took over. In the spring of 1997, about a
dozen of us formed a mailing list, and we occasionally use it to communicate.
There was some talk, early on, of restarting the story, but nothing came of it. I
think we all realized that what we'd had was one of those "moments in time" that
can't be repeated. Not by us, anyway... That list doesn't get much use these
days-- those years in between led us down separate paths. But perhaps they, like
me, get some comfort from knowing it's there if we want it.
But we don't NEED it anymore...
I like to think that I'll never forget them or our days
together in Calador, even if, later on, I can't recall names or characters. (I'd be
hard- pressed to remember them all now...) Maybe that, too, will change. But the
fact that I named my web site after the Stablegirl is a testament to the importance
of that stage of my life and a tribute to a special group of very real people who
changed the life of a painfully shy and awkward teenager.
So, in answer to the question, "Stablegirl?? What does THAT
mean?":
It means a lot...
