07-12-05 @ 9:12 am EDT

I hate being so anxious. -_-

Firstly, that SECOND person I contacted on that first penpal site, and who never wrote back...? Updated HER ad, too. I really wish they would just put in a disclaimer saying, "Not seeking Tehuti as a friend," just so I know to avoid them.

In any case, I got notification that I received responses on the other site I tried, and went to look at them; they have an internal webmail system so people don't get your e-mail address. I had responses there from when I first posted but the site never notified me! /:( Anyway I had posted a new ad there, making it a lot more succinct and less ranty (I get pissed off when those foreign guys just insist on hitting me up...and TWO OF THEM even took me to task once for sounding so "angry"...UGH!), thinking that might go over better. A few of the responses there were actually okay. Still not close enough for my comfort though. One person's reply was much along the lines of, "I like to write, but I don't do it very much; I also love mythology, but I don't know very much about it; but I noticed you have OCD, and I do too, and I thought we might relate..." It was a thoughtful response but I feel we wouldn't have enough in common to sustain correspondence...my OCD is something I just don't spend a lot of time talking about. I don't even visit OCD forums except once every several blue moons, and then I usually don't go back. Truthfully I mentioned it only because it might contribute to my problems communicating with people. (You'll see more of that as this entry goes on. Where does the social anxiety end and the OCD begin? By now, I do not know. Maybe one is just a variant of the other? Could be. What is OCD but generalized worrying about everything inconsequential, and what is social anxiety but obsessing over stupid things? :/ ) I made it clear in my second ad that writing and mythology are my two huge interests and if somebody I'm writing to isn't into those, it probably wouldn't go anywhere. I know that sounds terribly rude...but I just like to make sure we would have something to correspond about. Hopefully, we would get chatty enough over time that we could write an e-mail that has nothing to do with writing or mythology. I'm currently doing that with someone, but the reason we wrote in the first place was because of...writing, and mythology. o_o

(That's the quickest way to earn my attention and a response, BTW...comment on my writing. If somebody were to just e-mail me one day to say, "Hey, how are you doing? Want to be friends? I'd love for us to write," why would I have any reason to respond?? I'd have absolutely nothing to say. I would probably even sit here thinking, "Who does this person think they are, just writing to me out of the blue about nothing like that!" o_o I know, I have problems...)

Anyway, another response there, an older one I had missed, looks promising and I wonder if I should take her up on it...the only thing that caught me was she mentions she likes to tell long stories about her coworkers and such...I don't know how to relate to that subject. If it's something she spends a lot of time on, I might feel antsy. Still, she answered my ad, so maybe I should try. Oh, I can't remember--is she also the one whose ad didn't look like she'd be compatible with me at all? Drat, I think she is; maybe that's also why I'm hesitating. Her response to my ad was promising, but her own ad was one that I had looked at and passed over because she seems more into punk and industrial and such and I didn't get any feeling that we were alike. Hm. Well... All the rest of the responses there were a few women who really have NOTHING in common with me ("Hi, I'm in Ireland, I work with children, I'm looking for somebody to chat with"...I even said in my ad that I don't talk much about kids :/ ), or from GUYS!!! who can't read. (I actually got one from some guy who is MARRIED and looking for women online to FLIRT with! That one pissed me off so much! What was worst was I checked out HIS ad and he's specifically seeking MARRIED women to flirt with! What is with assholes like that?? Number one, I'm not married. Number two, even though I'm not, YOU are, and what makes you think I'd like to FLIRT with you?? Jackass! I have somebody you can flirt with, buddy--YOUR WIFE!) Still, the results were sure better than the OTHER site...ugh.

Well, I browsed the ads there and located a few, then responded to one that looked kind of promising...she's interested in a lot of the same things...she had a link to her Yahoo! profile so I e-mailed her through there instead of the site. I'm using one of my alternate Yahoo! addresses to do all this, so the people I write to don't have any links to any of my sites...I just feel embarrassed about any of them seeing Skew and seeing how militant I've been getting about this whole thing. "Cripes, if that's how she reacted to that one girl, how will she react to ME?? This girl is psycho!" -_- Waited a couple of days, got a short response; she was currently preoccupied but would get back to me. She sent me PICTURES in an additional e-mail. :/ That's rather odd. Not RUDE or strange or anything, just...odd. I guess I am just not used to getting pictures with the first mail. I was actually leery of opening it lest it be a virus. (Yes, attachments make me leery unless I have notice of them coming.)

I was not much expecting her promised e-mail, but it came last night...three of them. One of pictures, one a group mail with a link to her Yahoo! photo album, and one to me personally. I noticed that her second one (haven't looked at the pics yet) was addressed to a LOT of people...eighteen or something...and that made me start to feel anxious again. :( I saved her e-mails offline to read them line by line because I...I actually minimize the window and VERY SLOWLY scroll down the page, one line at a time, cringing, because I'm always so terrified of what I might read. I do this with EVERYBODY'S e-mails. I'm just always so afraid of reading something hurtful. And especially with someone I just wrote to for the first time, I am afraid. I have it open and haven't even READ it all yet. It's been open for like the past hour. I've been proofing a bit of TAC:57, then reading a few lines, then staring at the walls and feeling so thoroughly stupid, then trying to proof, and getting distracted, and feeling stupid again...and she hasn't even said anything MEAN or anything yet, in fact she's all nice. Still I feel awful and horrible and very stupid.

I just keep agonizing over all these things.

All those people she sent the invite to. She already has so many friends! Why would she possibly want me as another? I bet all those other ones are a lot more cheery and a lot more interesting and fun than I would ever be. :(

Who's to say she won't get too busy with all of her existing friends and not have time for me? It happened with another person online not long ago. "I do not have time for you as a friend so I have to drop you." Thanks...could've saved me the trouble long ago when I asked to be your friend. -_-

She seems quite interested in one particular topic I don't know much about. (It's the subject of all her photos.) For the sake of being somebody's friend, I could at least try to ask questions about it, and not completely brush it off, but it's not an interest of mine. What if she talks about it a lot and I have nothing to say in return?

What if I do the exact same thing and yap about my writing, my writing, my writing, and SHE has nothing to say in return?

What if she doesn't much care for my subjects of interest at all?

What if my negativity throws her off? She seems very cheery...I have not a thing against cheery people...it's just that with SAD people, I at least have the assurance that, when they're feeling sad, I probably am not the sole cause. With a cheery person, if they are suddenly sad, I am probably the reason why!

What if despite her promise not to leave me hanging, she does the same as the person before? Remember--99.9% of people I have been in contact with have done this, eventually, even if it takes years. I've literally come to expect it as the NORM by now. I can never think, "I wonder if we'll be friends?" but rather, "I wonder how long THIS will last before I don't hear back..." -_-

(Aw, kitty just twirled for me.)

What if I determine that we do not have enough in common, and *I* have to break it off? The burden is, after all, on me, since I wrote to HER. I am so awful at telling people I don't want to write to them. Especially after *I* contacted THEM! Fortunately, this doesn't happen often enough to keep me up at night--usually it's the OTHER party who just stops writing--but still...

I don't have any pictures of myself that I want to send her. I don't have any good pics to send her at all. (If I send a Mackinac Island pic, I risk falling prey to the following worry--see below.) What if she finds this rude?

I'm leery of sharing ANYTHING I'm much into with her, unless it relates to HER first off. If I share something that relates to ME, I will fall into the trap of blithering mindlessly about my writing, my interests, me me me. I literally have to withhold (sic?) myself. How good will I be at that?

(Yes, I fully realize the stupidity of seeking a penpal with whom I cannot feel free to be myself. But...I really don't feel I can fully be myself with ANYONE. Not without seriously annoying and then driving them off, at least. :/ Did P. ultimately stop writing to me because it was mostly about my writing? I WAS trying to branch out, but he cut me off before I could...)

Will she finally see through me and see what an angry spiteful depressing person I am? (I can't help but wonder if that second girl didn't respond because she said she was looking for CHEERY, UPBEAT people, and I had to say in my response that I wasn't very cheery...) Another reason I am bad at writing to cheery people, I'm like the antithesis of cheery people. I'm like the black hole sucking all the cheer out of the room even when I'm not trying. This is probably a big reason why so many correspondences fail. Who but another depressed person could STAND all of this, all the time? And depressed people, it's a wonder I don't make them want to just kill themselves. o_o

What if I'm too serious (as I usually am) or try too hard to be jokey (which is not likely, but still)? If someone makes a joke and I fail to *LOL*, that can be awkward...I know I have felt awkward when I tried to be funny and no one noticed...I kept thinking, "Did they just not get it? Was I stupid? Do they think I'm an idiot now?" -_-

What if it eventually boils down to smalltalk? Since I don't feel free to be myself, at least yet, that means I cannot push my writing as I always feel like doing. I used to do this in the past, until most people made it clear that they were not interested. So I had nothing much to talk about. I'm so focused on the stupid stuff that I can never seem to sustain a conversation without it. >_< What will I have to talk about? I wish I were not so self-centered all the time. It drives people off.

What if I just come across as bitchy or annoying or whatever? Even saying "I'm sorry" too much can drive people nuts, yet I literally CANNOT stop myself from saying it if I feel I've bugged somebody--which is--ALWAYS! I think even in my first e-mail I ended it with, "Sorry if I bothered you." Lack of self-confidence is a big turnoff for confident people, as I suspect she is. (Well, her cheer and her long contact list rather prove it!) I can't help but wonder if it was one too many "I'm sorry"s or "I don't want to bother you"s or "Never mind"s that drove off all the other people who used to write to me. I realize it becomes a drain after a while. There was one person I avoided contacting from the penpal sites because she specifically said she didn't WANT people always apologizing, because what have they got to apologize for? My answer? EVERYTHING! Even RESPONDING to an ad is enough to make me want to apologize...I mean, LOOK at this entry!

Which leads me to what I was thinking as I started reading her response. I first saw it in my inbox.

"She wrote back, go figure. She probably thinks I'm boring or we have nothing in common..."

I opened up the one with the long contact list.

"Great, she has a ton of friends already. Why did she even answer me? She'll never have time or interest in me. Look, she engages in this one interest all the time. I just know I will bore her and she will not have the time. I shouldn't have bothered."

I started reading the first few cheery lines, in which she says she hopes we can become friends.

"I am STUPID STUPID STUPID!! STUPID!! I am SO STUPID to respond to these things! This will just go NOWHERE! She'll lose interest, we won't have a single thing in common--she's too outgoing--she has all the friends she needs--nobody wants a friend like me. Why would they? Why did she even post that ad? Why did I respond to it? What am I going to do or say now? I'M SO STUPID! Don't I ever learn my lesson? This will just go badly like everything else! And then I'll be crying and posting about this yet again! I AM STUPID. Why don't I just do the whole world a favor and STICK TO MYSELF...?"

And I haven't even finished reading it yet. Suffice it to say, no matter how cheery and friendly it is--in fact, the MORE cheery and friendly it is--the more I will be telling myself how stupid I am as I drag myself through it, and if I ever manage to get to the end, I will commence berating myself at length, reminding myself of my utter stupidity at bothering somebody, and then I will have to agonize over how to REPLY to this when I am the one who wrote HER in the first place. I feel so stupid. -_-

This is how I feel in response to a POSITIVE e-mail...?

No wonder people can't stand me. -_-


I've started EFMI, but it's going so slowly, draggy. It's like it doesn't want to come. :( I guess it's not solidified enough. I know a lot of disconnected things I want to happen LATER ON, but as for the beginning, I'm so hazy and stalling...*sigh* If I take TOO long I lose whatever few non-commenting readers I have left for that piece of junk...

I actually got a review on part of RTMI a while back from somebody who states that she and her friend have held several DISCUSSIONS over how they think the story will go, and this made me sad, because I really wish she would feel free to discuss it with me. :( Why would someone discuss my writing with someone else but not with me...? I wish I could have just told her directly that I would love hearing what she thought--what did she find worth discussing?--but all I could do was say she could feel free to comment again...she's been online but has not commented again so far, just as I expected...it seems most of the times when I get a REALLY enthusiastic review from someone I've never heard from before, that's all I ever hear from them. I wonder if they think I don't care what they have to say. I actually typed up a whole item and have it sitting in my port for just such an occasion, to let these people know that HELL YES, I CARE WHAT THEY HAVE TO SAY!...yet haven't made it public. Maybe, I tell myself, these people just don't want to talk to me. -_- I was really wondering what any of these people would think of the cliffhanger in Part 130 but so far nobody's mentioned it. :( Was it not as dramatic as I'd thought...? -_-

I also started a new story a little while back, the rewrite of Antakh Of The Apsiu, in serial/novel format; I call this AOTA and am on Part 3 so far. But I hesitate posting it. Interest would be remarkably limited, and I hate filling up my port space (706 out of 1000 so far) on something when I'm not even sure how long I will stick with it. It is so totally a WIP. I'd post it on one of the adult fic sites I use but they are all rather unreliable in terms of how long they will stick around. It's not nearly as graphic as TAC but it does have its scenes here and there. Hey, get this, it will feature Djeretu. :) I like that Kana for some odd reason.

I'm sad that I've gotten more work done on AOTA, and that it's coming along more smoothly, than EFMI, which SHOULD be the story to come more easily. -_- I don't consider AOTA a "legitimate" project yet. I felt this way with TAC a long while back; I felt guilty devoting time to it when I should have been writing something more important (RTMI); but in time I grew to consider it a legitimate effort. I just don't feel this way yet with AOTA--it feels like an "extra" story not worthy of the effort, like I should only be working on it in my offtime, AFTER working on something legitimate. Why do I feel that way about any of my writing? I mean, I put just as much effort into a BB scene as I do into a serial; so how come it doesn't feel as worthwhile? And not being able to work faster on EFMI is driving me mad. >_< Why is it sticking so much??

I just finished reading the e-mail. She is so chatty and friendly!! I hope I don't go messing it up like I always do. -_- I think I'm going to eat some olives.

I'm tired of typing this. I guess this is my entry. Enjoy and revel in the excessive anxiety.

ANOTHER KITTY TWIRL! :D