Kite

This is a repost of an entry that’s important to me from my OkCupid journal, but since not just anyone can view that, and it says a lot about me, here goes:I hadn’t taken a Myers-Briggs in a long time. Despite the fact that I almost never post here, it scores me as extroverted. It’s funny, because since I met T. and since I’ve been going to SF cons I’ve been growing less and less shy as time goes by. It’s a slow process, but it’s also not an accident. I’m purposefully becoming more outgoing over time, both for my career’s sake, and because I don’t see being shy doing me any good. Anymore, I’m just too interested in people and their stories and thoughts to maintain my former level of shyness. I might post more about this later, but I will say that ever since he published it, XKCD’s comic entitled “Kite” has stuck with me.

Sure, part of it’s the message, but part of it’s also that I had an experience over New Years a couple of years ago very much like that (sans actually floating in the air), and ever since then, I’ve taken an accidental process of lightening up and learning how to reach out to new people and turned it into a sort of personal mission. T. and I were walking along the beach at Nags Head, enjoying flying our new stunt kite, and this woman walked by, about our age (okay, about one of our ages) looking very, very lonely, and she stopped about 30 yards away and looked at us and up at our kite, and I thought and even mentioned that we ought to say hi, and see if she wanted a turn with the kite, but I didn’t actually act, and neither did T., and she walked on, and the potential for a friend, and the potential to lighten the day of a lonely person was wasted out of sheer purposeless shyness. I’ve kind of vowed to myself that that won’t happen again.