Sunday, October 11, 2009

A Brief Introduction

I'm not good with words.

I know, that's not exactly a ringing endorsement, stoking the fires that make you want to check this blog every day, but it's true. It's always been true. For as long as I can remember, I've had difficulty with words, and it's gotten worse as I've gotten older and had to express more complicated ideas. I mean, I can string sentences together; I know how to use proper grammar, spelling, punctuation and such, but I have a great deal of difficulty figuring out what to say.

Usually, when presented with a new idea or situation or whatever, it takes me a long time to figure out what I really think about it. I may have some sort of broad "like/don't like" gut reaction, but it takes me quite a bit to determine why I feel like that. By the time that I do, the conversation (if not several days, and the occasional glacier) has usually moved well past me. When I do finally find the words to express how I'm feeling, I tend to run them over in my head again and again to make sure they're right before I let them loose in the wild.

Unfortunately, they're often insufficient, so upon further questioning I stumble and flail and repeat myself, using different words, hoping that I'll hit something by chance that'll accurately get my feelings and opinions across. It rarely works. Often, I somehow manage to get across the exact opposite of what I'm trying to say, or something incredibly insulting that doesn't truly reflect how I feel, and that causes me to muck about even more while trying to repair that damage while at the same time trying to get across whatever point I was trying to make in the first place.

Now, I know, I know, this sort of thing happens to everyone, especially if sitcoms are to be believed. But it seems to happen more to me than to others, and has been known to cause me to freeze up during very important and intense conversations, which makes everything that much worse. As such, I tend to rarely offer up an opinion, and going on about something that I actually feel strongly about can give me the shakes. I've gotten better in recent years, but it's still very difficult for me to feel like my words are really getting across what's going on inside of me. Even now, I'm wondering if this post is getting the right message across or is an unintelligible jumble of self-pitying nonsense.

But that's why I'm here. This is going to be a place where I can actually put down in words what I'm thinking and feeling, and enlarge upon and defend those ideas and feelings if necessary. There might emerge a coherent theme among the posts eventually, but for now it's just going to be me thinking out loud. In print. On, um, the screen. know what I mean.

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