Gaia Maria
Alcyan: What Second Life means to you?
Gaia: SL is my fantasy world, where I can be whatever I want to be do almost anything I want to do, and have a glorious wardrobe and jewelry box . More seriously, SL allows me to experience things I never could in RL. It is like the visualization of my daydreams, where I can enact all sorts of fantasies.
However, it is also a place to meet some lovely people, interact with them through IM, chat and voice, get to know them, and make friends. I have a large friends list, and I have made some very good friends here, who I value, enjoy and appreciate.
SL also provides many learning opportunities in a variety of areas, and I enjoy and appreciate that, as well. In short, although entirely virtual Second Life is just that …a second life, and it has become, as real, in its own way, as my first life.
Alcyan: What was the reason you originally joined Second Life and how you see Second Life today?
Gaia: I belong to an organization called Nova Roma (www.novaroma.org) and 2 friends joined SL, and rented an island in Roma SPQR there. They did some extensive building there, and invited us to come and take a look. I did, took one look and knew SL was a place I very much wanted to be a part of, so I opened an account that very day. Now, SL means a great deal to me. It is where I go to relax, to enjoy beauty, to enact some of my daydreams, to spark my imagination, and to be more beautiful than I ever was . I also enjoy music events of all sorts, and, of course, my friends, there. It has become my refuge, my playground, and the place where all my daydreams can come true.
Alcyan: How important Second Life is to you?
Gaia: In some ways, SL is almost as important to me as my RL, because it is where I can live my inner life, the life in my mind, and it is where I can create my own reality. True, my blindness presents challenges (I’ll get into all that later) but SL allows me to do, and see, things I’ve only dreamed of doing and seeing. I know many people think of SL as a game, and in some ways, it is, but I realized its importance when I had serious avatar issues, and couldn’t get in to SL for almost 2 months. I missed it terribly, and was so happy when everything got untangled. Even that had ultimate benefits, though. But when my virtual nearly starved to death and I had to rescue her, my emotional reaction brought home to me just how “real” this virtual world has become!