A wee confession, with picture post to follow sometime soon.

I'm just going to come out and mention that I'm dealing with a little bit of phobia when it comes to blogging publicly.  This isn't going to be a super-personal blog but I'd like to get this out there so none of the new people I've been following or who might eventually want to follow me will understand that I'm not ignoring their comments or posts when I'm slow to get back about anything.

Boils down to a surprisingly ugly and character-assassinating turn one interaction took with a friend some years back, pretty much just a total misunderstanding between two "strong personalities" as another friend termed us at the time (I think that might have been polite for opinionated loudmouth assholes, and yeah I'd have to cop to that in application to myself in general).  At any rate, it was stupid and brief and I don't even blame the other person for any of it, but it was bad enough to precipitate my almost complete withdrawal from online chatter everywhere.  I mean, I went and deleted all my friggin' Amazon reviews lest some minor un-ill-intentioned thing I said set someone else off and I'd get yelled at again.  That's just how shitty and bad I felt at the time, and how much of a wuss I've been about posting anything anywhere since.  I think it's what bigger, meaner, tougher bitches than I like to call "butthurt" on various net forums.  "Aww, she took her wuddle butthurt and made all her amazon reviews go 'way, aww..."  That sort of thing.

And this was a few years ago!  Ample time to forget about it.  I'd been in stupid fandom flamewars online long before that one incident, with strangers, and thought I was thicker skinned than to let something get to me this way, but when it's someone you're actually friendly with that you like and suddenly a dragon appears from out of nowhere and it turns out that you'd conjured it yourself with some little reply to something that you didn't think could cause such fiery offense...  I pretty much just wanted to hide everything I had online so it wouldn't happen again with someone else.

Maybe I'm pathetic in this regard (and others no doubt) but it's taken me a long time to work up the nerve to go public with anything again.  I've had to do it all in tiny little increments spaced far apart.  The etsy shop, the flickr, all that and this blog is me trying to get over my stupid shit and stop being a wuss about posting, and even harder, to stop being such a wuss about facing comments and replies and such.  I swear I'm really not such a sensitive shy buttwhipped little thing in RL, but apparently I do play one on teh internets.  It was news to me at the time, unwelcome news, but it was a long damn time ago.  The amplified hermit behavior got stuck in there but good.


I mention this because if I'm horrifically slow to reply to comments left here and to check back on other blogs to see replies to comments I've left for anyone else, and if I don't update for ages and seem dead, well, I'm still being a near-total social net phobe but trying to get better about it.  Some days it feels like I just can't face interacting with people but I want to be a big girl, I do.  Unfortunately an acrid taint of cringing whining coward still wafts in my room and clings to all my things.  The net is chock full of bad interaction and misunderstanding, and you can think you've become immune to it but sometimes something hits a raw nerve and before you know it, you're slimed.  It can be very hard to become un-slimed again.  I know I've accidentally slimed other people too in heated debates (over important things like Vulcan reproductive anatomy no less), back in the day, and witnessed their retreat from this forum or that one.  Not all landmines are set deliberately, but they still suck enough to deal the dreaded net slime.

So here's to growing a pair at long last and getting over it.

(My pair, incidentally, will be Vulcanoid in character and accordingly tinted light green.  In no way will my pair resemble tropical fruit or swell to gigantic proportions every seven years, despite what anyone back on alt.startrek.creative.erotica or wherever might say to the contrary.)

So there's enough of that.  It's tiresome and I won't be bringing it up again.  I'll shut up now.

Actually no, I won't shut up about other stuff.  There, see, it's working already.