I think my personal difficulty arises when I try to find some truth to the way I find expression. For the most part, I have a near-constant sense of artificiality about my interactions with other people. This isn’t to say that I’m dishonest — quite the opposite. It seems my sense of the need for disclosure about my feelings, opinions, and so on is paradoxically behind my inability to express myself adequately, fairly, or accurately.

And of course, I have no idea why I even have a need for this kind of disclosure.

Online communication is dangerously abstract. Everyone knows the pitfalls in taking people at face value through their words. The lack of any other kind of expression, through gestures or speech, is rife with the potential to cause offense even in the most innocuous of circumstances, particularly when people are bad writers, or bad readers.

But in fact, there’s another danger. There’s a danger of losing contact with what actually matters. And there’s a danger of losing the ability to even define what matters.

When interacting with others in this environment, words seem to be the perfect distillation of a person. There seems to be no better way of analyzing and correcting, or receiving and taking joy in someone, than through their unaltered, unfiltered words. Words become people. And in the end, the only thing that can possibly matter about the people you meet online, the only thing of any substance for most everyone you’ll ever interact with, is what they say.

But of course, people are much more than what they merely say.

I’m saddened by a kind of loss today, which I hope will turn out to be a personal incentive to move on to other things, to regain the measure of what’s important. To rework my words and the words of others. To remove a level of abstraction; to build with words, and to transmit my love for words through what I say, and not how it’s said.

I am not comfortable with change, less with change that’s forced, or, on the surface, unjust. But I truly welcome each experience with some measure of expectation and hope. I try to translate the things that happen, small things and larger things, into a sensible direction.

It works, occasionally. Something else starts, or Alex, in his kind and patient way, focuses things for me, and I take direction from him. Life’s good, mostly, despite annoyances and troubles, and failings and helpless starts and stops. I live near the lake. When I feel like this, I wander down there and look out across its choppy surface, to the side I can’t see, disappearing into the blue or grey or white of the furthest visible edge of the water. There is a lot to see in the unseeable. A lot to look forward to, even in the thin line at the far horizon, where there’s no telling what will come, or who will bring it.

Louis About me Community, Lake, Online, Sadness