February 14, 2002

February 14, 2002

If All The World Were To Listen To Me

What a daunting task...to write in a forum so public as the internet. All of our lives we spend a lot of time trying to be special, to be noticed, to be worthwhile. Rarely do we think about what we would tell the world if it were to finally turn to us and say, "You ARE special and worthwhile and I care about what you think and feel." I sit at this keyboard realizing the limitlessness of my audience and I am almost paralyzed with indecision about what I should say. But just the mere idea that I could (somehow) connect with others and elevate the human experience through this medium is so exciting that I must type on.

At the same time, I am grappling with a very contrary motivation...the fear of aloneness, the fear of never being heard or listened to or understood. The fear of being ignored or even worse, being insignificant. This journal is just one little speck in the realm of cyberspace and I shall be surprised if anyone stumbles across it and even more surprised if anyone stays for long.

It appears this journal will be written on the emotional fault-line of these two opposing forces. Although I don't generally advocate deluding oneself, I need to suppress both the fear that this exercise is pointless and the awareness that it could be magnanimous. I am going to ignore the external audience somewhat and write this journal for the only audience I am certain will read with interest and that is myself. So this first entry is the last of its kind (for the near future anyway). This will be the only time I really address the external world. All subsequent entries will be (hopefully) more intimate in nature and more stream of consciousness in style.

I suppose that I could give you a bunch of information about myself such as my age, sex, height, weight, ethnicity, nationality, hobbies, education, marital status, etc. Perhaps it would help to establish a frame of reference to understand my entries or just give the reader some perspective. But I think I will leave all of that arbitrary information a mystery for now. After all, background information can mislead just as often as it can illuminate. Besides there is so much more to me than statistics. I am bigger than a bunch of numbers and names and other data that we would use to fill out a questionnaire. I am a human dealing with the same fears and fancies that all humans experience, but yet I am immutably unique, an ndividual, a person. And anyway, when I sit down and really think about the question: "Who am I?" I realize that one never finishes answering that question anyway since we are constantly creating ourselves? in a never ending cycle of self-definition and re- definition. I am sure whatever truth I decide to reveal in cyberspace will come out at a natural pace as I express my thoughts. I will unfold before you just as I unfold before myself.

Serenity