I learned a long time ago that smart people don’t need advice and fools won’t take it.

Unwanted advice is, in my mind, a breach of trust to give advice to people who don’t wish it. Maria and I live in a fishbowl, and it is a fishbowl of our own making. We are not recluses who live on a distant mountaintop and are invaded by intrusive paparazzi. We live open lives and share them, and we love our lives.

When I put up a photo of Maria riding Chloe without a helmet I warned her that some people would be upset, and we would hear about it. That is not such a big deal for us, it happens rather frequently, although Maria is new to the fishbowl, I have been living there a good long time.

It is the price we pay for writing and making art, for living in the new world of social media, where personal messaging systems suggest intimacy and friendship, even when they cannot truly exist. I have had an online stalker sending me nasty messages about my dogs, my dog training and my decisions about dogs for years now. She is especially cruel and seems damaged in many ways.  I briefly considered trying to stop her, but then realized it was much wiser to simply accept her existence.

This is the background noise of our world, like a train’s horn in the distance, or thunder from a distant storm. We have given up the idea of privacy in our time, the sense of sacred space around our lives that is protected and inviolate, the idea that we have the right to make our own choices and live our own way of life.

One day, I think, we will awaken and see just how much we have lost and how much we have gained.

I sent my stalker to the spam folder instead, she is like family to me now, her messages from the ether piling up in some cloud folder.

In our world, there is nothing one can think or write or share that does not upset or alarm someone, and when some people saw Maria riding Chloe without a helmet, they were quick to message me, scold me and warm me. “What’s wrong with you?,” said one. “Didn’t you read about Christopher Reeves? Make her wear a helmet.” We were setting a bad example, said some, Maria should always wear a helmet. Didn’t I care what happens to her?

Then there are my very favorite messages, they always begin with the same words: “I know you don’t like unwanted advice, but…” Wow, there is no surer way to get me not to take advice than to send me a message that begins in that way.

I had to laugh at this last message, though. If I went to Maria and told her she had to wear a helmet, I would be wearing one soon enough, but I would be lying on the ground,  there would be no pony underneath me.

What, I wondered, does it really mean to be sexist in our culture? Does it mean a man tells a strong and independent woman how she must dress, what safety means to her? I think of John Wayne in one of his most popular movies chasing his wife through the town and spanking her for being cheeky. The audiences loved it, they wouldn’t love it today.

Maria is a wise and strong and very sensible human being, I do not tell her what to do, what to wear. And why are people sending these messages to me? Chloe is not my pony, I do not ride her, helmet or no. Maria and I are a couple, we are not one thing, but two separate and independent people. If anybody wants to talk to her, they can send her a message directly, she is apt to be much more polite about it than I am.

And what does it mean to be a strong woman? That you need a man to tell you how to ride your horse or what to wear, and what is safe? I know nothing about riding horses. If it were me, I doubt I would wear a helmet to ride 200 yards on a stable pony on flat grass in my backyard. I would wear one in the woods or out on the road, for sure, I imagine Maria would do the same. It is her decision.

We live in a new world with new ideas about community and friendship. I have nearly 25,000 friends on Facebook and I appreciate them, but are they not friends in the known sense of the world, I will never see or speak to hardly any of them. Do they know me well enough to tell me what to do? Facebook suggests that they do. And there are so many things to warn each other about, this is the golden age of the lawyers.  We live in a phobic and fearful culture of warnings and alarms, I remember what happens every time I put up a photo of a dog sitting on the front seat of a car.

Henry David Thoreau took many risks in his year at Walden Pond, his journey and his writings would have had little meaning for us if the year had been safe, if he had followed all of the warnings and the rules, if he had lived in the time of social media. Risks and challenges have defined my life, if I had not taken any, I wouldn’t be her to message, I wouldn’t know Maria, there would be no Red or Fate or Simon or Chloe in my life. I would probably be dead by now, worn out by too many years of working for greedy people with no values but profit and loss.

I love Maria dearly, and would hate to see her get hurt, but I would rather see her hurt than give up the strength and independence that are the foundation of her soul and art and spirit. And I would rather give up my own life than be the person who presume to tell her what to do and how to think and what it means to be safe.

And if I wouldn’t do it, how do strangers sitting at computers in distant houses have the right?

People always tell me when I write about this that I am asking for it when I share my life.What do I expect, they ask?  I expect ore, I will always expect more. I always think that is like telling a young woman she is asking for it when she wears a pretty dress to a party. No one has the right to tell other people how to live and what do, unless they are harming other living things or breaking the law.

This, in fact, is the cancer at the heart of the animal rights movement today, the idea that you can drive by a farmer’s fence and invade his privacy and property and inform on him or her and tell him how to treat his animals just because you can. Safety and responsibility, like suicide, are intensely personal issues and decisions. I will never give up the right to make them for myself, I will never take that freedom away from anyone, strangers or the people that I love.

So it is an important thing to write about for me, because we are talking about identity, not about helmets. Identity is by far the most precious thing we have, we an lose it in a stroke or see it die by a thousand cuts. Every person out there who enters my life and tells me what to do is offering me yet another cut. I hope I never tire of calling attention to it.

That is the precious new boundary in our changing world.