The self: The written, the acted and the tolerable

[Tabouli]

The Goat:
> is the kind of person who hangs out on this kind of list typically
> good at acting and public speaking but rather shy in direct 
> personal conversation??

Excellent, excellent!   A nice juicy fictional/factual thread!  (on second thoughts, how does a thread manage to be juicy, unless you dip it in juice?)(Tabouli reads what she has just typed, blinks, and shakes her head)

The Cat princess quoting Amber:
> And, like invizible Amber, I feel differently about mailing lists 
than in person: "I love mailing lists. In real life, I have a 
difficult time speaking with people, particularly if they are 
strangers" but my reasons are somewhat different than hers. <

Correspondences, be they snail, email or otherwise, are a wonderful way to become a self-written fictional character.  In an exchange of written monologues, you can present the best and most interesting parts of yourself, you can redraft invisibly, you have plenty of time to consider your reactions and responses.  To a much greater degree than with a face-to-face meeting, you have Control.

I had my first penfriend at the age of 10 (an American girl from Vermont), and became almost a full-time fictional person at 14, at least for a couple of years.  At the time, I was so self-conscious and afraid of others' judgment I found interacting with people a positive torture. After every conversation I would go away and mull over the conversation, almost word for word, and discover ten or twelve places where I'd made a fool of myself, or misrepresented myself, or offended without intending to, etc.etc.etc.  Not to mention what they thought of my looks, my voice, my clothes, the way I was sitting, the brand of plastic bag I was carrying and so on.

I would lie awake and fret and fret, and end up apologising to the person concerned days later when they'd forgotten the entire conversation and (aaarrrggh!) thought I was obsessive and paranoid.  Everything I said or did would potentially give away that I wasn't the smart, friendly, socially functional person I was pretending to be, but the withdrawn, useless, socially clueless, goody-goody loser I had been in primary school.

I was also in a very snooty, sheltered, upper-middle class academic girls' school, mingling in circles where I had no outlet for my analytical, philosophical, offbeat instincts.

All in all, I was a very good candidate for an obsession with letter-writing (thankfully the internet wasn't around then, or I'd never have finished school!).  What a safe, stimulating domain!  I had up to 8 penfriends at one stage, but developed a particular preoccupation with one of them.  Male, inevitably, but also intelligent and philosophical enough to talk to about all the things that had nowhere else to go, and conveniently on the other side of the world, so I had total control over what he knew about me!  People at school, my family (troubles there as well, of course) receded into a safe, fascinating fictional haze...

The real world claimed me again eventually, when I was 17 or so, but the mark is still on me (witness my copious posts to HPFGU!).  Mailing lists just mean there are more fictional characters co-writing the story.

The Cat princess speaking for herself:
> My reasons: for one, I quickly come to feel that I know (and am 
friends with!) the people whose posts I read, and I don't think about 
the lurkers.<
>
>For another, I'm hiding behind the written word, where no one can see 
my appearance (this does NOT help with telephones).<
>
>And there is a wall of time-delay protecting me (not in Chat), where 
if someone does say something very painful to me, maybe it will be 
less painful to my feelings because of not being said to my face, and 
certainly it will be less painful to my self-respect, because if it 
makes me cry, no one will see.<

These are all the reasons why I first retreated into letters myself.  The first point is particularly interesting... I actually think I, personally, reveal much more meaningful things about myself through writing than I do through conversation, where all the walls of social nicety and appearances are in the way (not to mention the inevitably self-consciousness).  I think someone could know more about the part of me that's really *me* through a correspondence than a real life acquaintance of the same tenure.  Maybe I assume this all too readily about other people as well, perhaps wrongly.

What do you all think?  Do you think you, and people in general who are given to copious letter/post writing, reveal more meaningful things about who they are in fiction than in reality?  (depends on the person, obviously, but I still wonder...)  I often wish it were easier to get through to who someone really is in real life... there seems to be so much functionless form and small talk insulating people.  I remember getting introduced to the new occupational health and safety manager and even calling him down to adjust my chair and desk at work, and how stiltedly friendly and polite we were, for form's sake.  Then I learned that he had a band and a recording studio, and he learned that I wrote songs, and we sat down and had a *real* conversation, with feeling and genuine interest.  Suddenly he was a person, a person I might like to be friends with, instead of another anonymous colleague I said hello to in the corridor.

Mary Ann:
> Public speaking!? AAAKKK!!  Shoot me now!  Hate it passionately, in 
any form.

Zorb:
> Oh yes.  Extremely shy.  Actually, I used to be a lot worse.  That changed when I really got into acting in high school.  I've always been at home onstage; when you're acting, you're *a character*, and it's easier to do things you wouldn't normally do. 


Interesting.  These days my very job is public speaking, and, moreover, presenting often reluctant audiences with challenging and socio-politically charged materials.  I can't afford to let nervousness overwhelm me... I need to sound authoritative and think on my feet and sound like I know what I'm talking about!  Fortunately, I got to practise my public speaking on fairly uncritical Asian international undergraduate students when I first started cross-cultural training, and had found my feet by the time I started facing a sea of frowning 50 year old WASP men in expensive grey suits with their arms folded against politically correct claptrap, preparing to ask the nastiest jeering questions they can think of and walk out pointedly in 10 minutes if they're convinced I'm wasting their time (though I still quail, believe you me!).  After such baptisms of fire, I was amazed how much easier it was to do things like defend my thesis and make speeches at functions!

All the same, as Zorb says, public speaking in my professional role is easier because it's like acting.  Besides which, in the cross-cultural area, I tend to have a huge advantage over my audiences, anyway.  I've done enough to *know* the basic breeds of heckler, and have, over the years, developed techniques (and even slides) for dealing with them.  It's usually the most ethnocentric people who are the most aggressive, though you sometimes get someone who considers themselves an expert in a culture you've mentioned who is determined to discredit you, or a competitive academic or postgrad student who wants to trump you with more recent research and theory.  Cross-cultural training is no picnic, let me tell you...

(and ha, I was recently approached by a university who want me to train up some cross-cultural trainers for them!  They want me to produce a team of cross-cultural trainers in, wait for it, two days of training!)

Unfortunately, my ability to argue assertively does not extend very far outside the seminar room.  I may not come across that way, but I'm in fact accommodating to the point of wimpery and wussiness.  There's a terrible irony to the fact that I cut my cross-cultural training teeth on teaching international students assertiveness and social skills for living in an individualist culture, and veritably *modelled* assertive behaviour in roleplay after roleplay, yet am totally unable to be assertive as myself and am a total social paranoiac!!

Gah!

Tabouli (who did, nonetheless, gain hours of amusement from playing the loudmouthed, racist Australian in those roleplays...)

P.S.
The tolerable David:
> I always struggle with the feeling, IRL as well as on and off-list, 
> that people are only being polite and really they only tolerate (in 
> the bad sense) me.
> I don't know what the answer is - extracting assurances from people 
> that they like you works for a short time, but I rationalise it as 
> politeness after a while.  Possibly we do need more impoliteness, 
> after all, to earth it all in reality.

Ahhh, that ol' vicious circle of insecurity.  All too familiar.  If they insult you, they're telling the truth.  If they compliment you, they're lying in order to be polite, or manipulative (i.e. they want something).  If they reassure you that their compliments are sincere, at first you doubt their honesty, and, if they persist and seem genuine, their judgment.  Insecurity has a nasty habit of being self-reinforcing that way.  All the same, I'm cautious about abandoning diplomacy too whole-heartedly for Truth... that sort of philosophy is what leads to the sort of person Catherine described meeting at that party...


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