i want only the idea of your eyes - 2026/02/03
Today is a weird day. In the past 24 hours, I've learned that there are way more people actually looking at ckrow.bar than I would've originally guessed. While it's obvious that writing on a public blog means that anyone can look, it also doesn't feel truly public when you don't bring its existence up beyond a post on your bluesky with 6 followers (of which, 2 are bots). Who checks bluesky other than Hal!? Anyways, this realization did set off a mini anxiety attack that made me want to abandon Floor-it(?) February on day 3. It's not that I'm opposed to you all reading what is ultimately a public blog, but I guess my initial concept of 'public journaling' was much heavier on the journaling than the public.
One of said unexpected viewers mentioned:
"also i know you like the attention".
While it's probably just a comment meant to tease more than anything else, this made me uneasy to a level I'm embarrassed to admit. Not because it spoke to some truth I didn't want to confront; more so, because it reminded me of arguably one of the most aggressive changes in my personality I've ever seen, happening over the duration of my recent time in New York. Namely, I've developed a deep anxiety of perception, to the point where I'm overly timid in most social situations. My shyness has led to a variant of introversion (I dislike this concept generally, though this is a post for another time) in which my anxiety around socializing overrides any pleasure I may get from hanging out. I'm often left exhausted and unsettled after going to outings, meals, parties, and even workplace hangouts. For those who have known me longer than a few months, you'd note that this is a relatively new development. If you had asked anyone to describe me midway through college, I think "extroverted", "social butterfly", and "easy to talk to" would come up pretty frequently. I wanted to surround myself with as many people as possible, all the time. One of my largest barriers to achieving my goals was not allowing myself to be alone; having to eat a meal alone hurt so bad, and in my mind not having something social planned for both Friday and Saturday nights was almost a failure of character.
I had thought that this outgoing personality was a trait that I was born with/destined to have, given that my Dad is the epitome of the overly outward character that fed off the attention and reactions gained from his strong (and often controversial) personality. If there were people in the room who didn't know who he was within 15 minutes of entering, he would make sure to promptly leave, often in such a dramatic fashion that the few remaining individuals would quickly become acquainted with his absence. I do still very much so respect and love my father (despite not currently being on the best of terms), but this is definitely one of those traits that motivates the fear of being like your parent. Anyways, while I don't think I was ever nearly as much of an extrovert as he was, I think it felt (and maybe consciously still feels) that sociability was one of the things that makes me who I am. I would see it as a strength; a wide and deep set of connections that I used to help me achieve my personal and pragmatic goals. Now, reflecting after 5 months in New York City, I don't really find socializing for socialization's sake worth it, and I can count on one hand the number of people I see a week. It's strange to see a lifestyle so wildly foreign to even just a season or two back fit so comfortably in my day-to-day life.
Now, solitude is a virtue (though, not beyond spending time with those I really do love (you know who you are! (<3 (I'm beating yesterday's triple brackets, but I promise this is not going to be a new habit in writing)))). If you asked me to honestly tell you why this is now the case, I don't think I could give you a concrete answer. But if I were to psychoanalyze myself, I think I can attribute it to the lesson I've learned over the past year, which is that people really do talk all the time. Maybe naively, most of my life I've never really considered or cared for what could be said about me behind my back. I think this could also be attributed to some level of pride, where I was blind to all the things that could be said about me. But, this past year has shown me that people love to bring up other people all the time in their free time, even if there's no incident or direct "thing" to talk about.
Obviously, I don't think anyone likes to be talked about negatively, though if it were that simple then I'd think that everyone would have developed social anxiety by now. So where's the issue? Mainly, I think I find myself deeply unsettled at the thought of being seen as someone I am not. When people talk about you when you're not there, you rarely have the chance to make a case for yourself, to show them who you are. And maybe this isn't an issue for most, because they either aren't characters that get misrepresented easily, or they simply don't care all that much about misrepresentation! But for me, I've found myself in situations time and time again where I wish I could just let other people enter my mind to be able to see who I really am and what I really do stand for. It's not to say that people are badmouthing me and I'd wish I could defend myself at the stand; even in the cases where I'm being complimented, if it's ultimately a misrepresentation it still hurts.
At its core, I have a really hard time coming to terms with the fact that some version of myself, made up from a small subset of interactions and stories, could somehow become more real to them and their world than the real person who holds my name (me!). I imagine that celebrities may feel something similar when they see themselves featured in South Park or get impersonated on SNL. While I don't necessarily have sympathy for these celebrities, I think there is something fundamentally dehumanizing and scary about having your caricature become more you than you. Like a misused word, eventually society's understanding of a concept can supplant the original, to the point where the original is almost thought of as being a mistake or a fake. Gah! It's almost as if the skin of someone else was sewn onto you, and you have to pull and tug and scratch and pry at the seams of the fake visage to try to tear it all off before you suffocate. It doesn't matter if that skin was of an angel or the devil; the skin was never yours, and nothing will make you feel free when you're applauded for virtues that you never held or shunned for sins that were never yours.
I'm sure there are other reasons which explain why I have become much more comfortable in my introversion; age and my constant tiredness have definitely made it easier to say no to things, and the existing presence of really cool people around me has made it a lot harder to be excited to develop a relationship with the average Joe. But really, all of this doesn't explain the fundamental anxiety that comes with socializing in the way that my unsettledness around being talked about does. I know it's nonsensical, I know that everyone gets talked about, I know good things are also said to offset the bad, I know I'm not exceptionally notable, and I know I don't have anything to be truly ashamed of (yes, I have flaws and have made mistakes, but I think it'd be absurd to hold yourself to a standard where you're perfect)! All of this is moot though, as the anxious mind will never shut up and listen to reason so long as the unsettledness exists.
And so that is why hearing "i know you like the attention" really did hit me hard today. Not only do I not want the attention in this era of my life, I also am actively scared of it and all the conversation it can bring. Worst of all, the fact they had misjudged that I liked the attention just proves my point that being seen is enough grounds to be misinterpreted! I don't hold resentment towards them for saying this, like I said I don't think it was ill-intentioned. But my brain is extremely efficient at turning simple words into anxiety, then into a high school essay-length blog post.
So what does this mean for me, ckrow.bar, and the sort? I don't think I can fully answer that right now, I'm sure I'll need a few days to think about it since it has been less than a day before the idea of your gaze was replaced by a countable set of eyes. But I know for sure that this project is definitely not going to stop here, at least not this early! It'd be far too pathetic to flip so fast and flop so hard on Floor-it February; I can't end things on the obvious realization that posting publicly means that the public will see. Beyond that, I also think there's a real skill to be practiced in being able to navigate saying what you want to say with honesty, while also staying within the bounds of the audience. I don't want to see myself self-censor, nor cater to an audience, and I think it'll take some practice to get right. So please have some patience with me until I find that balance.
Ugh I'm so tired, this was way longer than I intended. Goodnight, and see you tomorrow.