[I posted this on Facebook today and felt compelled out of self-absorbedness to repurpose it as a blog post.]
From the department of "'But enough about me…' is not a phrase in my vocabulary":
You guys are killing me over here. So much fascinating stuff today, so many articles I want to read and respond to, so many interesting updates about your lives, so much plain old fun. I open my Facebook timeline and my brain is like a dog bombarded with a million amazing, irresistible scents. That dog is going to starve to death if it doesn't pick a rabbit to chase.
On top of that, my mental bandwidth is so narrow. It feels like dial-up Internet when what I need is fiber-optic. It's like in a spy movie when the spy is stealing computer files, and the bad guys are beating down the door, and you're watching the download progress bar, thinking "Argh, HURRY UP AND COPY FASTER so the spy can escape!" I feel like that during a high percentage of my waking hours. My progress bar always feels like it's moving too slow relative to the urgency of my impulses around information.
My "bandwidth" is frustratingly low in both directions. In the incoming direction — I'm not a great reader. I have to reread a lot, and it takes me more effort than your average bear to put together a mental model of what the heck the writer is saying. Maybe I should work to improve on this, to learn to read. That said, on rare occasions when that mental model interests me, I will turn it over and over in my head long past where most people would have been tired of it. I fiddle with it, critique it, boil it down. I try to think how I would communicate it to someone else. For better or worse, I am glad I do that. I value my fussiness — I think it means I care about getting things right — though I wish I could direct it more selectively and productively.
In the outgoing direction — I often struggle to express myself in words. Takes me way too long to compose simple email replies. Yes, writing is partly an act of discovery, and a certain amount of writerly squirming is necessary to figure out what I think. But sometimes, honestly, just spit it out already. No one is going to judge, remember, or necessarily even notice this thing I'm writing. And if they do judge, well hey, it's a free American country [1], I can say what I want. This is also something for me to work on, the spitting it out already.
There's a flip side, which is that I can babble at length once I do get going, which is not great in terms of having good conversations. It's both a social skill thing and a cognitive thing, I think.
All I really meant to say is, I'm trying to rush through my Facebook-skimming today — a few quick likes and shares, and then step away, and get back to various tasks I'm behind on. But you guys make that difficult.
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[1] I could swear this is a line from Taxi Driver, spoken by Peter Boyle's character. Can't seem to find a reference online though, and the phrase is not in the script that I found. [Update: My sister thinks it was Archie Bunker who said "free American country", and I think she's right.]