me me me, and the forum

12:28 PM 1/24/11

That was challenging.

I'm trying to talk in a forum about a subject that I know hardly anything about, to people who know a lot more than I do. It's an extremely complicated and deep subject and there are a lot of disagreements between different theories.

Then I also start noticing people's feelings while they're writing back to me. I just noticed a painful strain of some kind from one person and I want to resolve it. My immediate response is, 'Oh, no no no, don't worry about me.' This isn't anything important, it was just some crap coming from the voices. I actually don't care too much about this. So I'll have to write that in there somehow. Sorry about that, it wasn't 'me,' it was 'them.' I had a feeling of almost wanting to cry, and trying very hard to do something and be helpful.

I feel the difficulty of reading purely theoretical material, trying to understand what it's talking about when I've never seen it before, and not knowing how it would be practically useful to me. I'm used to reading about things that are of immediate practical value. I read Edward de Bono, and he's talking about techniques for how to use your brain. You can just start using the techniques right away. But when I read the abstract theories, I don't know how to use them right away.

There is another bad thing going on, which is that I wrote the blog about how if I started a social movement, I was worried that I would be bombarded with people asking me out on dates. Then the next day I was hearing voices saying that people in the forum took that to mean 'don't ask her out on dates, don't try to get close to her, don't ask for anything personal.' But the forum, and the social movement, are two different audiences. The social movement was going to be an ad on Craigslist. That is the sad truth. That was the method of getting people to see the link to the page about baldness. So it's going to be seen by everyone in general, ordinary people. But the forum is a different group of people altogether. They are more intellectual and more book-reading and I hate to use the s-word, but, 'smarter' in general than the 'average people' looking at ads on Craigslist. Anyone who's able to barely read is able to look at Craigslist, but the people in the forum are different from that. Whatever applies to the general audience on Craigslist isn't going to apply the same way to people in the forum.

Everything I say probably makes it worse. It's digging a deeper and deeper hole. I hate it when I say something that hurts someone's feelings and then no matter how I try to explain it it gets worse.

So I have some anxiety now.

It's strange to interact with real people who actually respond. They are so unpredictable. I've been quietly writing in my blog, in my isolated world, with few comments and a small number of readers. This is the 'me me me' world. Now I'm writing in a very active forum with a lot of members, and everything you say is going to be seen by a lot of people who are very active in writing back. You can write something and see responses from several different people in a few hours. Then you try to write back to them. It's overwhelming. I would spend all day in the forum writing and interacting if I wanted to thoroughly talk and respond to everyone.

After some experience, I will be hardened, or I will make rules about how much time to spend there. Either way, eventually I will start dismissing people. Respond to this, ignore that. Right now I feel this duty to respond to everyone and everything, and I actually try to do it. There will be limits. It's physically impossible to do everything that needs to be done. It's almost funny to watch me as I try very, very hard to understand things that are impossible for me to understand. That is a clueless newbie.

I will have to define what my goals are and how to go about doing them. 'Just talking about stuff for the heck of it' is the hardest thing for me to do. Unless it's talking about 'me me me.' Then it's easy.