Simon's Life

About me

I'm going to start this with something that should be fairly simple for me. I'm going to describe how I see myself. Due to things like my job, where I get given a list of things that need fixing/refining, it's going to mostly be things I perceive as flaws.

First and foremost, I am a Christian.

I am a 18 year old male New Zealander. Roughly 6'0.5" tall, weighing in somewhere between 80 and 90 kg (I'm guessing that. Last time I was weighed was when I was applying for my passport in 2008, with a mass of 80 kg). I'm about to start my first proper year of university at VUW, doing second year maths and computer science.

I have two cuddly elephants, named Blumpy and Sergey, and a sheep, named Fredrick. I also have a 15" 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, a 8 GB iPhone, the VPS this is running off, a 17" CRT monitor that does get red input, a 1 TH external HDD, a 2 TB external HDD, a 2 GB SSD on my watch and 2 graphics calculators. So you could say I like my gadgets.

I enjoy football. I play as a keeper and support the Wellington Phoenix, the All Whites and, to a much lesser extent, Man United. I occasionally follow a game of cricket while I'm working as it can go on in the background and is easy to catch up on if I miss half an hour or so.

That pretty much sums up who I am externally. That's likely to be all I write about it as well.

I am rather strongly introverted, though I do have some social tendencies. As such, even though there's certain people I enjoy spending time with, I need a lot of time by myself. Usually this is fine and my reclusive nature means I get plenty of alone time.

There has been a couple of times, namely yesteryear's IOI and the recent stock taking we did, where I have been around people for so long that I end up too drained to be able to respond in a normal manner and I need to spend days recovering.

For some reason, the socialising I do over the Internet doesn't have this effect on me unless I'm already drained. I'm assuming that this is due to it being my most common method of being social. Outside of the internet, my social life is pretty much poker on Monday evenings.

I'm also generally lacking in confidence. This means I struggle to show emotions or affection for fear of something going wrong and having my rather low levels of confidence dashed. This fear also leads to not wanting to take risks and is the root of a more prevalent fear. The fear of being rejected.

I have a really strong fear of rejection. This leads to me being unable to organise events or spontaneous social things for fear of being turned down. I will also choose to keep the status quo, no matter how much I'd like something different, for fear of the rejection of the proposed change by other parties turning into losing what I already have.

On top of that, I'm unlikely to invite myself anywhere or invite someone to do something with me, even though I really want to, unless I'm already certain of their response. If you can be bothered going back that far, look at my trying to build up enough courage to ask Sarah to my ball. It took about ten tweets of fluffing around the question before I implied it well enough.

Beside that, I seem to have relatively good self-esteem and self-confidence. I know what I can do and usually don't need affirmation from others. I've gotten so used to a lack of affirmation that I can't handle compliments easily. They seem to make me awkward, especially if I can't just brush them off. Though I'm slowly getting better.

I am rather good at bottling things up and then keeping them secret. This site is partially an attempt on my behalf to let some of those things out in a more controlled manner.

For a nice sum up, I require a lot of time to myself. I struggle with emotions and affection and am lacking in confidence with regard to other people, even though I have reasonably good self-esteem and self-confidence. I have bottled a lot of things up over the years and am trying to realise them without exploding.

Purpose

The purpose of this site is for me to get some things written down that may not be appropriate for my blog or its audience. These things will mainly be things that I normally don't (and can't) talk about face-to-face with people. This gives me a somewhat controlled medium through which to release these things that would otherwise build up.

I will try to be clearheaded when writing posts, though that may get difficult with certain topics. I will endeavour to not accuse anyone for my problems and will try to write in a way that retards inferring accusations as well.

If you don't feel comfortable with what I end up writing, don't read it. I make no apologies if I make you uncomfortable. I'm not expecting that much interaction, even though comments will be enabled most of the time. Depending on the content of the comments, I may turn on moderation for them as well.

Being social

Most people that know me somewhat will realise that I rather lack social experience or skills. This seems to stem from an inherent shyness and inability to interact with strangers. These also lead to a damped ability to interact with people on a sociable level. Namely, I can't initiate and struggle to continue small talk. This leads to some interesting paradoxes.

It is trivial to state that I enjoy spending time alone. Which comes in handy as it is what I do most of the time. However, there is a small group of people that I would willingly be around for extended periods of time and risk potential epic social burnout. A subset of this group don't seem to wear me out. (After all, the Jung test says I'm roughly 20% extroverted)

There are also certain times (now appears to be one of them) when I actually would prefer to be with people in this group than alone. This longing to be in a social setting is something I don't understand at all. Usually I couldn't care less about spending days at a time a lone in my room.

Too make things worse, a side effect of enjoying something social is to want to go out and be social again. That doesn't happen. Instead I spend the next two weeks painfully away of how pathetic my life is, hoping to get invited somewhere.

During those two weeks, I am more aware of the amount of socialising that my siblings are involved in. This usually invokes feelings that I find harder to suppress than normal, mainly because I want to get out of my room and interact with people, but can't. Thus these feelings, all of which are negative, build up until they get let out. Twice this has resulted in me snapping.

I believe that these built up emotions are also one of the main sources of my depression. The more I'm stuck inside my room while others get out and be with people, the more I analyse how pitiful my life is and the more depressed I end up getting. This leads to a nasty cycle of be getting depressed at how much my life sucks, so I go and muse over it and end up getting more depressed.

Do I want to change this? Yes. Do I know or have any idea how to? Nope. As far as I can tell, due to me not understanding social interactions, the changes are going to have to be started by others.