On being me

Sometimes I catch myself saying verbatim something I wrote in my blog earlier and then there's a moment of panic in which I think oh shit, what if they recognize me from my blog? but then I remember that no one really reads this blog anyways, at least not people I know in person.

At one point in time I gave the address to my friends and a couple read for a while but gradually they stopped, and haven't for at least two years now. Just as well.

But still, I find myself wondering about that and sometimes I find myself making a conscious decision to not link to certain people that I know in real life even though I know they have blogs, and they don't know that I do. At least, I think they don't. I don't know why I do this.

Actually, I do. I think it comes down to the fact that I inhabit a lot of really different circles, and none of those circles really overlap much.

One of my profs at one point in time got us to do an exercise in which we had to list all the people we consider to be really close friends and then draw lines between the ones who know each other. Needless to say I drew very few lines.

The point of the exercise was that the more all your close friends knew each other, the more closed your social circle was and the less you had to adapt to different social situations or something to that effect. The fact that I drew no lines means that I'm constantly changing hats, playing different roles, having to make use of more diverse kinds of cultural knowledge and customs, and I'm more intelligent than average (he said that, not me).

I'm not sure about the intelligent part, but the rest makes sense. I always get the feeling like I have my toes dipped everywhere, but I don't feel like I fully belong anywhere, and I don't feel like I'm the same person at all from context to context. That's why it's weird when my friends meet each other, and why for the most part, letting my friends meet my other friends is really not a good idea because it never seems to work out.

A lot of times when I cross the boundaries of whatever is "me" in one context, it's surprising or people don't want to hear. Maybe that's why I'm a tad hesitant at the thought of outing myself. I think the bloggers who have friended me on facebook have a pretty unique perspective there, whether they're aware of it or not, because I'm far more conscious of what I do and say there, how it looks, and how the audience to my actions is a mishmash of people from so many farflung circles.

I'd like to think that I'd gladly trade it all for belonging somewhere, but I probably wouldn't, and for some reason I don't think it's really an option anyways.