Opening up, yet again

I go through these introverted and extroverted phases. I started off as a loner, and then something happened during a class picnic to Coorg in 1997 that changed me, for what I thought was forever. I suddenly started opening up, made new friends, talked more to my existing friends, gave up all my inhibitions and basically had a good time. That phase continued maybe for a year and half, or maybe more, and then I shut down again. In IIT, I started oscillating wildly. At times I’d be aloof and keep to myself, at other times I’d walk across to the coffee shop in front of my hostel, buy myself a cup of cheap Nescafe and sit down, with random people, and talk and talk and talk.

Between five and two years back, I went through an “online extrovert” phase. I’d forever be online. When available, I’d have an average of four GTalk windows open, chatting with different people about random things. The first thing I’d do when I switched on my home computer would be to find people who were online and message them. It was a lot of fun, though the person who ended up being my wife found it weird that I spent most of my time online, chatting (it did help, though, that she would often be one of the people I was chatting with).

Certain “life changes” and redefinition of priorities and some unexplainable stuff meant that I shut down once again around two years back. Ironically this came only a couple of months after I thought I’d truly opened up and gotten rid of my inhibitions. I suddenly had less time to just “be online”. I’d hardly talk to people. GTalk being blocked in office meant that I disappeared off so many radars which were tuned in my direction. I had less time for “frivolous chatting” after work, and one by one I got “out of touch” with all those people I would chat with regularly. Things were quite good otherwise in life so I didn’t exactly bother, I must mention. Among the side effects of this, I think, was that my writing quality suffered. As did my network, of course.

To illustrate, I spent three weeks in New York City in January 2010. Then, I made every attempt to contact friends and acquaintances who lived in that area. And met them for lunches and dinners fairly regularly. I tried counting the number of people I met during that trip, but it was easy to lose count. I had a good time, I must say. In February 2011, I was in New York City yet again. This time, though, I didn’t make any effort to meet anyone, didn’t inform anyone I was in town. I had most of my dinners alone, in a list of restaurants I’d gathered from a few friends. I met one relative, and one friend (this was by chance), and that was it.

Over the last few days I’ve started making a conscious effort to open up again. Once again, whenever someone suggests we meet, I make it a point to go. I’m making an effort to not bail out of social engagements citing “NED”. I met a friend for tea on Friday, another for tea on Saturday, had a long phone chat with yet another on Friday night and met a whole bunch of people I don’t often meet for dinner on Saturday. And I had a lot of fun in all of them! I do hope I can continue with this streak for a while, and also need to figure out how to expand my network. Anyway, the more perceptive of you would have noticed by now that I’m blogging a lot more nowadays.

Why I don’t blog about her

The sweetheart has one fundamental problem with my blogging. That I have hardly written about her on my blog. Being the girlfriend of a celebrity blogger she deserves better, she argues. And she pulls up the reams of posts that have been written here about my old crushes and accuses me of not loving her as much, given I don’t write about her.

While I agree that I haven’t written much about her, I believe there are several important reasons behind that. I don’t know if she’ll buy into this reasoning but I believe these points need to be made.

Firstly it must be recognised that angst is a major fuel for writing. When what you thought was a great “deal” (in terms of relationship) falls through, it creates immense angst which needs to be channelled somewhere. And writing about the subject that causes the angst is one of the ways of channelling the angst. There have been occasions where I’ve managed to channelize the angst in other productive ways but in the last few years writing about the source has been a good source of getting rid of it.

Then, there is the time and effort factor ( I think this is the reason she is least likely to buy). Running a successful relationship takes up a large amount of your time and effort, and that’s not necessarily bad. I’m not talking only about tackling fights, misunderstandings, etc. here. When you have found someone to share your life with, there is suddenly so much more to do. Your life changes in ways that you had never imagined. Your life becomes so awesome that trivial pursuits like writing get the short shrift. You might have noticed that my general quantity of output has diminished in the last year.

Lastly but most importantly, there is the issue of not wanting to rock the boat. When a deal falls through, you have nothing to lose from it. You don’t care what the counterparty of the fallen deal thinks about you anymore. And that lets you unleash. When things are good, though, there is a relationship to protect. You just do not want to rock the boat. Every time you write about her, you want to make sure you’re not writing something that might offend her. Or something that will take a great deal of effort to defend.

Every time you sit down to write about her, every line you write, you end up thinking four times what she might think of it. And that disturbs the flow in which you are usually used to writing your posts. And once that flow is disturbed, you don’t want to write anymore. You would rather write about something which you can write “in flow” than thinking four times about every line you write.

On a similar vein, you might have noticed that I hardly blog about my work nowadays. The number of work-related posts since I joined this job would be comfortably in single figures. And that doesn’t compare favourably at all given the volume of work-related posts in my earlier jobs. I love my current job and have settled down nicely into it, and intend to put gaaji here. There is little angst that this job creates. And because I like this, I spend that much more effort doing my job than writing about it.