About Me

When do you know a person?  Can you ever truly know someone?  I've been thinking about this a lot today.  I have had a few blogs over the years, and on each one I have tried to write an "About Me" post that tells the reader a bit about me.  The same problem crops up all the time however, and it's the same problem you run into when you join a social network, or fill out a dating profile, or to an extent when you apply for certain jobs - how do you describe yourself?

In the case of the dating profile, often the site asks you for a series of statistics about yourself - height, weight, hair colour, eye colour, physique etc, and in some cases a little more intimate than that.  In the case of jobs you have often provided a similar list of statistics in the form of work and academic experience too.  In both cases when it comes to the free-form text box for you to write whatever you want, that's when you have to start thinking.  Social networks are much the same, in a way your profiles end up being a somewhat "social CV" detailing things you like, hobbies, interests, and groups etc that allude to life experiences you have had, where you have lived or studied or worked etc.

In all these cases you come back to that one place where you can write whatever you want with no prompt for specifics.  The same thoughts inevitably arise when you are presented with this question, the foremost being "what would they want to know" and "what do I want them to know" - two questions that are not easy to answer.  This post for example should be a post about me, but what exactly would people want to know about me? - or even, what do I want people to know about me?  The latter is harder to answer than the former because for me my life is pretty much an open book, people that know me can ask me anything, and within reason I'll answer - just be warned, don't ask a question you might not like the answer to.

The problem with the former however is that you are leaving the creativity and imagination to the asker, and most peoples' questions are limited when they don't know anything about you to begin with.  Getting to know someone is like a sculptor being presented with a solid block of marble.  They can't see yet what it will become, and the only way they'll make any progress is to chip away bit by bit in an effort to shape an image.  The more confident the sculptor becomes with the image they want to create, the more ambitious they become with their effort to shape the marble.  Over confidence leads to mistakes that can ruin the sculpture entirely.  When you get to know someone you are the sculptor, presented with a generic block of marble tasked with creating a sculpture that represents accurately the person you want to know.

Depth inevitably becomes the greatest danger here.  Too deep a cut too soon can ruin the entire sculpture, just as too deep a question too soon can ruin your efforts to get to know someone.  I think I am guilty of cutting too deep.  Ambition gets the better of me and the desire to create a masterpiece leads to mistakes that can't be undone.