Getting To Know You

It takes time to get to know someone.  How much time is proportionate to how much you want to know about that person.  One reason why we tend to prefer the company of the people we already know is because of the history that is shared even if that history is complicated or even toxic, it can still seem preferable because it is a lot less effort than actually getting to know someone new where you begin from scratch.  This can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective.

As I have written in the past, there was a time when I wanted to know as much about other people as I could, I would ask questions and listen to all the stories they told of their life up until the point that we met.  The older I got the more difficult that became because of the simple fact that the longer you have been alive typically the more of a life you have lived and the more of a story you have to tell if someone wants to catch up.

There are however people that I don't know personally, whose lives I gain insights into through the fact that they live their lives in part online.  They share their experiences as they live and there are times when I think if we met in person we would probably get along if it wasn't for that initial hump of familiarity that has to be overcome.  When you add in social anxiety for either or indeed both people and shyness and a myriad of other difficulties that create reticence and barriers that hump can grow into a mountain you have to overcome if you want to get to that level of friendship that you have with the people you already know.

They say it gets harder to make friends as you get older, I don't actually think that's true.  I think the amount of work you have to put in increases but I don't think the process of getting to know someone ever really changes, all you have to do is talk and listen it's not that complicated in theory we just build it up to be something much more complex in our minds.  Like many things when you are a child you do it without thinking, but with age you convince yourself it's much harder than it actually is in reality.

I've toyed with the idea of an autobiography many times in my life.  I've started writing it and stopped after a few chapters each time because I don't think that anyone who wants to get to know me would actually take the time to read it.  This blog for instance has a lot of content on it at this point and there's a lot more to come but the vast majority of people who read it are people that don't know me personally.  There are only a handful of readers that I know personally and even then only a few who like to discuss what I have written for it.  Part of this I dismiss as the fact that people who manage to get close to me generally know me quite well and won't find much if anything I write on here to come as much of a surprise to them, in fact it is often the conversations we have had privately that inspire posts. 

If I was a character from 'Sex And The City' then I was once Samantha but have become more like Charlotte with age - both of which might surprise people who don't know me personally assuming that I would have been more akin to Carrie given my proclivity for writing.  I am however reminded of a scene from SATC where Carrie mentions her column and her three friends basically admit they don't always read it.  The thing is, despite every intention to be open and honest on this blog there are things I cannot say out of respect for others' privacy and out of the desire to keep a degree of my life private too, but more than this, every post has a narrative and some of the thoughts that run through my head aren't always coherent, they don't always come together in a way that they can be formed into something more.  This is one aspect of our lives that being friends and living together in the moment has as an advantage over your online persona in that random thoughts are often shared in passing in conversation.  Whilst the likes of twitter offer an opportunity to share some of those thoughts, even there not everything is suited to being a tweet for the whole world to see.

That does inspire the question, how well do you actually know the people whose lives you see online?  We all know the likes of Instagram and Youtube most of the time should be taken with a pinch of salt, and columns in tabloids and websites that propagate content for ad revenue are ultimately written in the context of attracting clicks and increasing impressions of those ads.  This blog does not contain ads, I don't make any money from doing it, and I don't use it as a means to constantly promote my published works it's entirely possible to follow it and never even know about those if you don't read every post.  The point of this blog isn't to try and sell anything to you the reader, it's predominantly an act of meditation or therapy for me to write and you just get to see what is produced as a result.

Would you and I get along if we met?  Possibly, if you've read quite a few of my posts and you're still here then the answer is probably yes, the main barrier to that is that initial period of getting to know one another, that's the hardest part.