Fighting with Myself

I look at other sites on Neocities and see all the interaction devices they contain. Visitor counters, guest books, comment sections, the works. I find myself getting the urge to add them to my site. I often get very close to the point of opening up my IDE and adding one before I remember that I deliberately decided against these things. Then it takes some thinking to remember WHY I made that decision. I once again had one of those moments. So here I am, typing out my rationale to hopefully avoid this moment again in the future.

I don't generally like people. I've always been a loner. I played mostly by myself as a kid until I found a tight-knit friend group of 3 in elementary school which expanded to 4 in middle school. Once high school took us our separate ways, I only kept up contact with one of them and I only gained another close friend once I started dating my current husband. I've had many shallow friendships during all this, but I had no deep interest in any of them. I'm sure most of them would call me a friend, but I had difficulty saying the same. For me, a true friendship is much deeper than just hanging out and chatting about my day. I prefer friendships where I can get deep on a topic with someone and really feel a connection between us. I might be weird, but anything less than that feels artificial to me.

This little anecdote is just to explain why I act the way I do online. I've been online since the late 90's but never really established a presence. I went to forums, I played online games, but I never really participated socially. I might've made an offhand comment on a Gaia Online forum or chatted with a passerby while fishing at Barbarian Village. But these instances were exceedingly rare. Most of the time, I preferred being alone with my thoughts. This was probably all due in no small part to the crippling social anxiety I was developing at the time as well as the bullying I was receiving at school. Neither of these are an issue any more but the tendencies still remain. I hate being in the spotlight. I hate being the center of attention. If I could go through every single social event as a fly on the wall, I would.

As an adult, I've been trying to let go of all this. I want to put myself out there. I want to be confident when I give a presentation. I want to not worry that I said something wrong in that conversation that happened 3 months ago. This site is part of the process of me trying to let go of my anxiety. And with so many years of baggage, that process needs to be slow and methodical so it doesn't collapse in on itself. Right now, inviting any kind of interaction on this site will only lead to fear of ever posting anything. I'm going to give myself some time to post like this without any feedback. I need space to pretend like I'm talking into a void, so I don't go on an anxiety-induced rampage and just delete the whole thing. I hope I'll be able to stick with this. It's been fun to flex my creative muscles and express myself in a new format. Once I get comfortable, maybe I'll add in some of the fun features that I see elsewhere. But right now, I need to take it slow.