my thoughts are marbles, roll with me

79. Always be writing and when to be vulnerable

I always gotta be writing, somewhere. I've decided to try to take more notes to the books I've been reading. It can be messy notes (that I'll try to haphazardly rewrite the notes on my Obsidian MD...), but I need to be more conscious about the things I indulge in/pay attention to, right? I'm trying to give myself a conscious effort of archiving my thoughts and sharing them, but I haven't really gotten out of this rut yet... And honestly? I think the only thing holding me back is me.

Honestly, if I don’t write for too long, and if I don’t publish for too long, it starts to take a toll on me. I start to feel like I haven't made progress in myself, that I don't have things to report to anyone, especially my friends. I've made this blog so I can write my thoughts to the public, but I don't necessarily want any feedback or people writing to me about it. However, I do appreciate it when people say they've read a post that I made and nothing more. The very thought of something appreciating just a morsel of my brain gives me the motivation to keep writing and keep being vulnerable.

Ray Bradbury talks about his own relationship with his writing in Zen in the Art of Writing (1990):

“But what would happen is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. For writing allows just the proper recipes of truth, life, reality as you are able to eat, drink, and digest without hyperventilating and flopping like a dead fish in your bed.

I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days and I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow. An hour's writing is tonic. I'm on my feet, running in circles, and yelling for a clean pair of spats.”

Over the weekend, I decided to put myself out there and use a lot of language-exchange penpal (Slowly and Bottled), friendship, dating, and social applications all at once so that I can say hi to a bunch of strangers that have a smartphone. I thought that this would be an exercise in putting myself out there and being a bit vulnerable. I think I've learned a couple of things:

  1. I'm overwhelmed when a bunch of people are trying to talk to me. Unfortunately, I ignored many people because they didn't seem super interesting. They probably are pretty cool, but I didn't give them much of a chance. I didn't really read their profile bios in detail, just skimmed through them for interesting tidbits (if they say something out of pocket or if they had a weird fixation on a foreign TV series). After purging the uninteresting people, I developed a contact list of favorites that I paid more attention to- For the regular contacts, I have about 20 international friends, 10 Bumble BFF friends, and 5 really local Hinge people. And then I stopped using Hinge and Bumble after 5 days. It was too much commercialism and bizarre people offering their Disney plus subscriptions to me... I've noticed that many of the women I tried to talk to didn't answer my message at all.

  2. The people I talked to in my local area are very eager to meet up. I think I put: "trying to figure out what I wanted in a relationship", as one of my "relationship intentions", so I think people were turned off by the way I want to things to an incredibly glacial pace. I didn't like to be romantic off the bat, although I did refer to a lot of the outings as "dates". I thought to myself: if there are solo-dates, and friend-dates, there has to be a: "I don't know this person, but I'm willing to try to become their really good friend first before becoming romantically linked?" date, right? (I thought it was really normal... almost all of my family members were about 7+ years together before they got married) It's totally okay though. There are some dates that I didn't really phrase my message to them well (e.g., I said: can we just go out as friends?, but did not clarify after haha... That was totally my mistake.) Honestly, I didn't really mind when people didn't want to meet up with me after I told them I wanted to be a friend first, and they were quite polite in their decline. People are more serious in dating/relationship building than me and that's okay. Intimacy is really weird. Also, I think the step back into "dating" or whatever is a very slow and gradual process for me.

  3. I found it very strange to meet up with me after talking to me after an hour. I kind of urged for more communication before meeting up, but I think that annoyed a lot of people and they slowly stopped talking to me. My international penpals would always welcome me into their country and told me that they would be a guide. I'm often flattered by their offer, but am weary about it. I feel like I'm overly prudent and am constantly worried about self-preservation.

[Here's how I feel like influencers have an advantage of having a parasocial relationship with their followers- their follower/fans will get a little bit worried if they haven't posted in a while...]

A couple of people I've met through penpalling and typing to them:

I think I had an interesting approach to how I tried to connect with people. I made my intentions clear with how I talk to others... I think I came across as charming (in retrospect, maybe I was just flirting? who knows), but apprehensive to being a little bit personal. Initially when people declined to hang out with me, I kind of felt like I pissed off a lot of them for wasting their time. Maybe it's just me, but I think I put a lot of thought in writing to them, so it was a cool social exchange back and forth. I didn't take it personally if they rejected a hang-out offer. Personally, I kind of thought of it as talking practice...

Although I didn't really go out on an official "date," I'm actually kind of proud of myself for trying to make new friends like this. It's a little weird, but I think that it was a good exercise and that I learned what I like and what I don't like about people. I'll just take this little social experience (literally a social thing for me) as a win? A win is a win, baby.

~ a social butterfly,

<3 K