If you are reading this, this means you.

I am very bad about replying to individual comments on my blog.  There are a multitude of reasons for this.  Sometimes I am genuinely swamped with work.  Most times, the fault lies in the fact that I am a fundamentally shy person, and I agonize about sounding stupid.  But I wanted somehow to make it known how much those comments really do mean to me.

To those whose primary exposure to me is through the SCA, and not this blog, this comes as a surprise, since I have a redheaded personality, with all the connotations that go along with it.  I have a low boredom threshold, and an irrepressible urge to fill my entire day with activity, and this forces me into more social contact than my basic temperament would otherwise allow.  That notwithstanding, trust me, I am one of those people who could go for months on a deserted island without human contact and emerge with my sanity intact.  I am that introverted.  The friends who are closest to me can testify that the public persona and the private personality share only a few points of intersection.

Writing, at the point of creation, is a fairly solitary pursuit that agrees with my almost constant need for introspection.  Some people, when they are rolling over an idea in their heads, like to talk things out.  I prefer to write my inner dialogues.  I have had several people ask why I view blogging as cheap therapy, when so many of the things you want to get off your chest would make imprudent writing.  I guess my answer is that those kinds of things simply don’t occupy enough of my thought processes to disturb my nights and days to the point where I have to unburden them.  Whether because I am that wishfully naive or that cynically jaded, individual people, individual actions, individual situations, don’t faze me that much.  At least, not really.

What I and my inner voice carry on long conversations about have to do with the generalities of the human experience that are illustrated by the personal vignettes and interactions of my life.  What do they tell me, not about a person, but about people?  What motivates people to act the way they do – the heartbreaking, the ugly, the touching and the beautiful?  What are the inner conversations that motivate the behavior of the “other”? How do they see themselves when they act?  And how other people witness the same thing that I do, the same person that I do, and somehow see something and someone radically different?  I am driven by the need to understand, and hopefully, to accept.  I want to read minds.

If this were a purely internal act of reconciliation, I would write everything out in a Word document and save it in a little folder on my hard drive.  But to be honest with myself, I have to make the realization that my internal world is rather one-dimensional.  As open-minded as I like to be, I named this blog “My Level of Awareness” for a reason.  Einstein, like in so many other things, was right on the money when he stated that  “Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them”.  This blog, in its third manifestation, was created and named with that purpose.  To expand my level of awareness.  To bring the inner conversation into the light of day.  To add voices to the internal debate.

Although you may not think you are engaging in some profound metaphysical conversation when you comment on my frustrations as the aging mother of a crazy toddler, I assure you that you are.  Sometimes you are comforting me that my inner voice is not alone on a tangent that the rest of humanity does not share.  Sometimes you are reigning me back when I AM on that tangent.  Sometimes you add a perspective that it never occured to me to explore.  You are helping me to not only understand humanity, but to come to an honest understanding of myself.  And sometimes, you are helping me to reach out and to forgive – others when I am hurt, and myself when I fail.  You are taking me out of the frame of reference of my life and giving me new eyes to see.

And, even more important, you are taking my hand when I reach out, in my paranoid introversion, and assuring me that there are wonderful, vibrant, interesting people out there, friends that I have yet to meet and something to look forward to every day I log in.

So if you have ever left a comment in the past, or even if you haven’t and you just stop by to see what insane things will come out of my mouth next, I want to say thanks for coming by.  Thanks for reading.  Thanks for sharing.  Thanks from the bottom of my heart.

Give yourself a hug.  Or a manly handshake.  Your choice.  You deserve it.