First Steps in 2nd Life

First experience of SL
I am on my second avatar as I have been exploring in preparation for developing an island for Gifted and Talented children in Teen 2nd Life before I heard of Muvenation: so I am reflecting on that experience.

Exploring 2nd Life has been obsessive for me in a way I would never have imagined.
The obsessive phase has been an excellent way to shed a few pounds before Christmas as I kept forgetting to eat, almost moving into the digital world where food is not necessary and also I suppose living off my nerves meeting new people and learning from them.

I compared it with learning on line poker when I moved from playing a machine to playing real people on line. Players with aliases left comments and made remarks during the games and whom I ignored to start with until I got some confidence and started winning. I was constantly nervous but realised this was great way to combat fear of failure, through an anonymous avatar. Fear of failure has plagued me as a high achiever and now I ma working with gifted and talented children to help them overcome potential risk aversion, hence my interest in 2nd life avatars.
I have not yet bonded with Amorphia, my alternate, as I relate to my first avatar who went through the first days and has been in 2nd Life daily. However I did experiment with turning my first avatar into a hideous dragon-fly occasionally to see the reactions of others. Interestingly I met the most interesting avatar and RL person behind it, on speaking to an avatar in the form of "Pedestrian man" his interpretation of the road signs, and on another occasion, he turned into a giant origami style star. He was new like me and interested in the creative side of SL and became my first friend. I have been learning and practicing my language skills in SL and have enjoyed this aspect erring of enormously, with dictionaries and notebooks, adding Dutch and Finnish to my smattering of languages. I am still amazed at the quality of English spoken in SL and one Dutch person told me about how he had learned a lot of his English through conversations in SL.

I was also struck how helpful people were from the Help island mentors to people I met. There is much complimenting of people on choice of avatar, garment, or hair etc and I began a collection of sparkly effects enjoying the magic of SL. I was approached early by someone asking me if I was an alt because they thought I looked so individual so quickly which I deemed to be a real compliment.
Interestingly as time goes on I have used SL for IMing friends running several conversations at a time discussing real life hobbies and real life experiences. It is interesting how simple role playing which is fun in the get to know you phase soon moves into more personal conversations although I gave away no real identifying information. “Pedestrian man” has now moved into my facebook as the only person I have allowed to make that transition. There were so many interesting pieces of information I was able to verify from numerous conversations that I had no doubt that he was genuinely who he described himself to be, and so far away geographically there was no chance he would arrive on my RL doorstep, if he could find out where it was.