Unhealthy attachment

I had to turn my back on Twitter yesterday, for as long as I can take it, because it was proving to be an unhealthy part of my life again.

All told, I really don't have that many friends here. I really only know a small handful of people well. The rest are what I would consider acquaintances. They are friendly to me and I like them, but they really don't care if  I live or die, or at least wouldn't notice for awhile. I tend to become too attached to people, especially if I feel some sort of kinship with them. When it becomes clear to me that it is not mutual, my self-esteem gets squashed. That has happened more than once recently, and I don't think I can handle any more of that right now.

I'm an inherently social person. I need that personal interaction, and before all this social media, I actually had more of that than I do now. It's easy to feel like you know someone based on their tweets, particularly if you interact with them a lot. However, realistically, this is a delusion. You can't know someone based on an online personality. Still, I get caught in that trap of thinking that someone cares about me as much as I do them. I invest a lot of time and effort in what I believe is a genuine friendship, and then they disappear or stop talking to me. I'm sure for many people, this seems trivial, and I would argue that those people have a much larger support network, and social media is just a small component of that network. Still feeling like a newbie to town, mine is pretty limited, and, I'm realizing, woefully inadequate.

Revelation: Order from chaos

I absolutely thrive on creating order out of chaos.

I just had this revelation about myself on the way home from the roller derby scrimmage, at which I was serving as penalty tracker. When I think about, I'm overwhelmed by all the aspects of my life to which this statement applies.

The things I am relatively good at include statistics, database management and creation, programming, and apparently being a non-skating official (NSO) for roller derby. At home, disorder drives me crazy, so I am always thinking of how to organize things or put them in some sort of order. Even when I do something that initially creates a mess, I only find peace when the project is done and everything is back in order.

This might seem trivial, but it's kind of amazing to realize that what brings me peace is so simple and yet sometimes so hard to achieve. I also recognize that some people are best at creating that chaos that I feel a need to find order in. Now I wonder if I actually need those people to feel like I'm actually achieving something by organizing the chaos they produce.

In any case, this is a big eye opener for me. In fact, this might even manage to create some order in my often chaotic mind.