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> Could anyone even recollect my past
> visits here? Sojourner, a quiet
> melancholic poet from afar.

I recollected your handle, but not any posting details. But I definitely possess an overall sense of "worth reading".

> How do I come up with topics to talk
> about if smalltalk is so tiring for
> me? Would it be too weird to straight
> up suggest meeting in real life? Will
> they gladly find the time and not
> ghost my proposal again? Am I right
> to compete for their attention? What
> if they respond with monosyllables or
> half–answers, turning my attempts
> at sustaining the conversation into a
> grinding nuisance?

Let a die (as in "dice") do the volitional heavy-lifting for you per:

The Dice Man

> Why does online contact feel so
> artificial and forced? There are no
> non–verbal signals to enrich words,
> no physical presence to create a vessel
> for the intimacy of two minds. No way
> of establishing a mutually agreed pace,
> no shared experience of circumstances
> to guide the thoughts. No silences
> full of meaning, no comforting sight
> of a friendly human close by. No
> interplay of senses, no pledge
> of attention. Something deep in me
> rebels against this digitally encoded
> ersatz of life, rejects this mode
> of communication as being something
> normal.

To me the content of that paragraph *after* the first sentence describes a relative incompleteness, so perhaps your effort to bring such to what feels more complete feels artificial and forced?

> Yet I'm nearly incapable of breaking
> the barriers in my mind that keep
> me afraid of meeting and keeping up
> with people even offline, those old
> and new alike. Maybe it's a fear of
> vulnerability, of letting others see
> into the real fabric of my soul and
> being misunderstood, exploited or
> dismissed?

I was rather shy my first 20 years of meat-space, but somehow came to the idea of *acting* like a confident someone with important things to be heard... and eventually the acting/pretend became the reality - i.e. the greater self-notion came to no longer see such as acting, but as part of Being Me.

Something like that....

(FWIW, a nice crutch to more quickly gain confidence momentum in the early days of such acting was to go places where I was unlikely to encounter anyone that knew me such that there was no one there to call - i.e. challenge - me on seemingly not being/acting myself.)

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~sojourner wrote (thread):

Making social decisions with dice is a *dicey* proposition, but surely worth at least conceptually meditating on.

Well, actions do shape character — deliberate, albeit at first purely performative, efforts at becoming something are bound to have lasting effect sooner or later. That works both ways, good and bad alike.

The nice crutch that you mention actually sounds like a good idea. I'm thinking about how to go about it. For now, I'm facing a few weeks with limited opportunities for such an experiment, but in may… We'll see what happens. Thank you for the food for thought!