2024-06-09

• Sometimes I share things about myself in a way that, when reflecting on it, is more about avoiding rejection than finding connection. And that’s kind of a bummer. Where is this coming from? Well, yesterday, I met a new person. They were nice and interesting, and I really enjoyed talking with them. And I think they enjoyed talking with me! But I came away from the interaction feeling like I had really held back parts of myself, including parts that I think are cool and interesting. My intuition is that I regularly hold things like that back. And I think that goes back to trying to adapt to past experience, where sharing those things resulted in, let’s say 80% of the time, people going “oh…uh…sure…😐”. Aka my attempt at connection fell, mostly, flat. Naturally, my adaptation to this feedback was to share this stuff less/later. Unfortunately, this adaptation meant that I also lose those 20% of initial interactions where people go “no way, me too! that’s so cool! 😀.” Of course, the strategy of withholding weird/cool parts of yourself can be ok if you have sufficient time to let that stuff come out over multiple interactions. You delay gratification to interaction #2 or #3, for example. But it does seem like another one of those environmental factors of life at this stage is that the bar for “let’s get together again!” is actually quite high, both for me and other people. So when the first interaction is “just ok” or even “good, but not great” I’m very likely to not follow up, as is the other person. And so there is never a “later” to share the stuff I think is actually cool/interesting, even if it’s not really normal. (For context, a classic example of something weird/cool I might share would be “I spend a lot of time doing flashcards/trying to figure out ways to make learning/retaining stuff fun and interesting”). In any case, wanted to write about this stuff, which I think helps bring clarity to my thoughts. And also to put it out there that I’d like the pendulum to swing back towards “express weird+cool stuff about myself earlier to connect with the right people early on.” Obviously, the times where sharing stuff about myself falls flat really do suck. That’s still true, and I don’t have a solution to making it not suck. But it doesn’t seem like my current approach results in particularly great outcomes either, just a more drawn out, lower intensity failure. I think I’d like to swing back towards failing fast and early, a hallmark of the younger me who didn’t really know that 80% of the time his interests would not be shared, and also a recognition of an important idea: time is not really abundant.

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