This sent me spinning.
Kind of reminds me of my reaction when reading The Grace Awakening.
Is self-absorption wrong? Short answer—only when it lacks love.
If the focus on self follows a similar model to C.S. Lewis’s metaphor about ships, then no.
Most of my follows are persons who follow just to get follows. I have one friend (with whom I speak regularly) who uses Twitter. The rest of the persons I follow are news outlets or blogs I like or writers or friends who don’t really post but whose posts I would read.
I won’t play the follow game. If I follow 30k people, my feed won’t have anything worth reading. Just self-promotion. I will lose my “curated content.” Likewise, all who follow me will be persons who don’t want to read my stuff but just want to self-promote. No thanks.
I want my social media interactions to be… interactions. Not screaming into a screaming crowd.
I’m reading Harry Potter. And perhaps the thing I like best about Rowling is her whimsy. Now, the temptation to emulate someone I like is fairly standard and something I am aware I should generally avoid. But I think something needs to be said about feeling free to be silly. I don’t have to be so serious all the time.
I’m almost always silly with persons I love. Either silly or surly. Sometimes just sarcastic or ironic. But rarely serious, unless I have been moved to be such, and then only insofar as to communicate that thing about which I am serious. This of course doesn’t include times I am afraid or angry—those are the times I get quiet.
How should I edit my Learning By Keyboard documents prior to posting them?
The temptation is to appear to know all things. To be a superlative thinker and writer.
I read through these things I dealt with months ago, I find things that I have since corrected (in my thinking), and I want to change them to represent what I think now. I don’t want to appear like I don’t know something.
Guidelines for writing my thinking documents.
I should only have guidelines that protect me from veering into showmanship. I shouldn’t turn this into some legalistic, neurotic pursuit. I should try to remain true to what I naturally do, which is write to think. The only difference is that I’m revealing my inner dialogue to others.
So how does a person think out loud? Or more accurately, how does a person who naturally fixates on appearing like he has everything figured out think out loud and still be authentic in doing so?
You are choosing based on what you interpret that you want. Therefore the thing you want to do the most is to do what you want to do the most. And I imagine that’s because you want to do what’s “right” or “perfect” the most, and you’re leaning toward the idea that what you want—what’s “authentic” for you—is the best. Interesting.
I guess the issue is beliefs and values. What drives me? To be perfect. By what means? By being authentic. What should drive me?
I wonder what’s behind my wanting to be perfect.
You are not constrained to write anything other than what’s natural to you.
And what’s natural to you can be described as “what you want to write apart from external constraints.”
It’s the same idea as “be yourself.” You don’t want to act like someone else or like some standard or “what you should be.” You want to be authentic.
I posted this vignette previously, but after receiving some critiques, I reworked it.
“You scare me,” a previous draft began. But the ghoul of perfection cornered me, and in desperation my task took way too long, with way too much censure. Revealing my unedited self, as opposed to the comfort of studied abstraction, makes my face warm and my hands shake. So the deceitful strength of rotting fingers keeps you and me apart. But like the steps of my pursuer’s persistence, only by means of repeated encounters can our romance succeed.
“You scare me.” I began this way in a previous draft, but my need for perfection compelled me to take way too long and to have way too much censure. Candidly revealing my unedited self and even emotion, as opposed to concealing me with studied abstraction, scares me. A lot. But only by means of numerous dates can this romance succeed.