Does Your Avatar Reveal Who You’d Really Like to Be?

My Second life avatar is a guy with piercings on both his ears and green hair. He wears crazy clothes and he has tatoos on both arms. In real life, I am a basic shirt and jeans guy with blonde hair. I don’t have tatoos and my ear ring hole on my left hear closed a long time ago. Recently I started thinking about the person I want to be. Am I being who I really want to be? If my avatar has all these features, does that indicate something I want for myself? Am I just conforming to society? I slowly began to realize I might be. I go into a clothing store and wonder what clothing other people would find attractive on me instead of buying something I like. I don’t dye my hair because I fear my friends would consider it “gay”. I don’t pierce my ear because I worry my boss might not like it.

I constantly overhear people saying things like “I would like to dye my hair that color, so that’s why my World of Warcraft character has it.” or “My Sims character has a nose ring I always wanted.” Why don’t you have your hair that color? Why not have that nose ring? I’m aware that we sometimes have avatars that get super creative and feature things we would never think of having ourselves. That is the fun of it. But I also think we can learn from our avatars if we are forced to think about why we make an avatar the way we do. We might all be hiding who we truly want to be in our first life.