Shyness

 

Two years ago I promised I was done with Baltimore. I declared very publicly that I found the ethos loathesome of everybody I knew and they would never see me again. Why? Fucking Israel criticism.

My beloved grandmother was dying and I felt my loyalty divided as I usually do by two groups who often sound like they want to burn everybody who disagrees with them as a witch, and generally not in a great mental state. I speculated I was on my way out of Baltimore to rebuild my life in the County, and as usual, I burned what was left of the bridge rather than rebuild what I feared was missing.

I'm not the hyena you think I am. I'm not the madman I think I am. I'm not me around you, 'me' is around music and books, writing things on a page and trying very hard to do creative and intellectual projects that inevitably get abandoned, 100x more at home with ideas than people and just grateful for the privilege of being able to surround myself with ideas I don't understand. I'm very curious, but I'm not all that intelligent, I just play at being it online.

In eleven years in Baltimore, literally nobody knows me in real life better than they know me from a facebook page where I can speak with a voice slightly more authentic than in person. Other people use social media to share selfies that shout to the world their fun lives and your dull one, their physical allure to your ugly mug, or how loved they are by their significant others in comparison to how hated you are, I seem to shout 'look how smart I am and how dumb you are.' Beneath every share is an intrusion, an unspoken comparison to the person who unwittingly sees it. Yes, it's partially about sharing happiness, but sharing happiness inevitably inspires envy among those who lack what you have.

Was this really my intention? Of course not, but social media is more powerful than us. It flattens every aspect of our character to 1s and 0s. Everything is either a problem or it isn't, and no context online's yet been developed evaluate a problem's severity. Every small problem is now an existential problem.

I'd say that all this has compromised my social life but for eight years I haven't tried hard to have one, and in the early Baltimore years it got me noticed by a number of 'in-groups' who wouldn't have given me the time of day if they didn't find me funny and weren't intimidated by my keyboard-tongue.

No, I'm quite shy, bookish, disorganized, clearly a little narcissistic, an emotional yo-yo, an outsider to every group I've been inside, easily intimidated and rarely find social interaction fulfilling. The domineering steamroller/clown people think they know is a tic, learned early in life when a severely LD kid realized he was having a colossally difficult time of it. For eleven years the situation did not change. Tucker thus developed a contest with himself: dare his nerve to speak his mind at all times. Show perpetually that nobody could intimidate or break him; a lifelong chip on his shoulder that cost him as many friends as it made.

Will finish this another time... maybe never, maybe later tonight.