Aw don't say that PLEASE ! I would liked to meet you again. I really do !

I'll admit I haven't talked to you all that much, but when I have, I've enjoyed talking with you. I also greatly admire the suits you've made, and are part of the reason I was inspired to make my newest suit, Ryou. I would love to continue to see you at meets and conventions, so I can hopefully talk to you more and get to know you better :)

I'm extremely flattered that my work is among your inspirations on Ryou's creation.

I fully recognize that I don't do a good job of offering myself up to let people get to know me. At times I catch myself doing things to actively push people away and I hate it.

And I want to assure that I didn't intend this to be some sort of "departure speech." I still want to try to put myself out there and form stronger bonds with people. It's just all my stupid internal blocks that keep flairing up and sabotaging my own attempts at socialization.

Oh! I'm so sorry I hadn't realized that you felt this way at gatherings. I guess I always somehow got the impression that you weren't interested in getting too close to people, so I felt like reaching out more toward you would've been unwelcome at best or intrusive at worst.

I'll echo Ikodo and say that I've always enjoyed talking to you, even if what we talk about is surface-level costuming stuff. I really admire your dedication and ingenuity, and I'm sure those traits will also come though elsewhere in other places of your personality. You have nothing to worry about! You're a cool guy (:

Anyway, if more personal conversation is not unwelcome, I'd be happy to broach those sorts of subjects when we next hang out. I tend to be a pretty open person myself (and lord knows that Otter is), so you can feel free to ask us more personal questions, too.

Hooray friends!

It's a lot of internal blocks from anxiety and such that has caused me to do what I've done. A dramatic majority of the time, it causes me to just completely clam up instead of open up to people.

When I'm around conversations, I just feel like I don't have anything to contribute or relate to what is being talked about so I just sit there and just listen and nod along. So I just watch as people with good rapport going back and forth and I feel like if I say anything, I'm going to kill the flow. I'm sure a lot of it is feelings of not wanting to draw attention away from something good and feelings like I'm doing things that amount to "NOW LOOK AT ME!"

It also causes me to reflect in my own head that I've done so much stuff just by myself and I don't actually do all that much so I don't have the breadth of life experiences and stories to bring up to the table.

I see it and completely recognize it as it's happening but I just end up just kicking myself in my head and stay silent about it. Sometimes I'm even trying to formulate in my head some way where I could say something and contribute, but it just turns into me debating, hashing, editing, and reworking how exactly and just when I should speak up that I just let the moments pass on me.

All that time of just being quiet makes it even worse when I do speak up. Maybe I do have something to add to a conversation or dare I say it, someone asks something about me and I actually allow myself to open up. After, the overly self critical part of me looks back and yells at me with negative thoughts like "they don't really care about that," "you're not really that interesting," or even something as dumb as "you were talking too much".

Among that is I don't end up looking back at the total overall amount where I'm an active participant vs being a good listener like I feel I should when reflecting back and judging myself. Instead I just look at the quantity and duration of the time where I'm quiet and just someone taking up a chair as one thing and then the short spans where I'm talking too much as a polar opposite.

I didn't intend this to become such a long reply. This is one of the reasons I originally split the events into a separate post where I was trying to be more positive and divorced from what I recognized was going to turn into a stream of consciousness overly self critical vent post.

That's okay! It's your journal. Your replies can be as long as you want (:

(And I'm sorry for the delay in my own reply; I often don't check FA for days at a time, and it can look like I've fallen off the planet when really I've just been wrapped up in other stuff.)

Is it easier for you to be around fewer numbers of people at a time? Like, if there are fewer people or conversations to keep track of, do you feel like it's easier to judge when it's okay to contribute to a conversation? Or are you also nervous about talking to people one-on-one?

You said, "...I've done so much stuff just by myself and I don't actually do all that much so I don't have the breadth of life experiences and stories to bring up to the table." When you say that you don't do all that much, do you mean that you don't have a lot of hobbies outside of costuming? I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, as long as costuming and building things is really what fulfills you.

Do you also find having new experiences to be intimidating? If not, you could make a conscious effort to try new things or go new places, if you think it might broaden your life experience base and ultimately make you a more interesting person. Maybe you'll discover that you like speaking French or baking pastries or camping in the desert... or maybe you'll dislike most of the things you try, and you'll discover that costuming will always be your greatest passion after all. Either way, you'll learn something about yourself, which is never a bad thing.

To be honest, I often see vent posts like this as an open letter to myself. I know there are things I need to change about myself. I let them stay bottled up and float around amorphously in my head but things like typing them out not only help give the surface level thoughts form, but open up the flow to get me to list out deeper things I need to work on as well.

It also often acts as another bit of ammo in my belt to get me to kick myself in the head to actually act (and to mix metaphors to a painful degree).

A lot of my reluctance to open up or join in is from being hyper critical against myself. The things I've been saying are things that I fully recognize as the negativity projecting self doubt into those situations.

I'm not sure if it's always about the number of people gathered around but it could be the context. I'm sure I've got lots of things I really should be getting off my chest, but I get extremely reluctant to actually speak up about them. For example if it's a party type thing with lots of people having fun, laughing, and enjoying their time, if something is on my mind I hold my tongue and bottle it up because I feel like it would spoil the atmosphere by bitching about something. Maybe it is also something that when I do go out, it is working as the distraction I need and making me forget or not worry about it for a time.

The other half is more what I view as my lack of anecdotes that I perceive as being something that's relatable. Again the anxiety isn't about reality but instead being overly self critical and thinking anything I could bring up would ever meet my inflated standards of what my self sabotage formulates. Plus I have a lopsided perception that makes me believe I'm just giving the same stories over and over again when I'm sure it isn't the case and it's just because I'm the one hearing myself repeating myself in different company.

And like I said, I am working on getting over things like these. Taking small steps at a time. I've done half steps in the past towards literally opening my home up to having guests but finally saying out loud (digitally) to have some people over for the Super Bowl was something that spurred me to take care of stuff to make an event of it rather than just having a bunch of garbage food by myself again.

Hey man, it was a lot of fun chatting with you at IFBC and AZ Furcon. If you remember me, I was the local photographer snapping photos of the attendees. If you want to grab a drink sometime and chat, just let me know! I'm totally cool with that. : )

- The Desert Fox