Wanting to Be Known

I've always wanted to be known. That's why I started this blog. That's why I've applied for no less than 8 reality shows in my life (no joke). That's why

I think that maybe one thing I've learned through this whole thing is that I don't really want to be known after all.

Not in the Hey-World-Look-At-Me-And-What-I've-Done sort of way, anyway.

(It seems like a foolish wanting, now that I sit here an think about it, and I am happy to abandon it. I'm not quite sure why I ever wanted it in the first place.)

But I think that what I do want is to know and be known, in terms of human connection.

Getting to know people better, and having others get to know me. (Neither of which I am inherently good at.)

Marc Barnes wrote, in this article about the anthropological origins of the duck-face pose: The problem with popular photography is not that it makes a relation to the person photographed difficult, but that it professes to make it easy, when relation to another person is the most difficult, terrifying task in the universe.

And that it is, my dear readers, that it is.

I think about people who hug other people so easily in this world. It seems like most people do, at least in my world anyway. Everyone around me likes to hug.

But I do not.

And then I watch this video:


And I think about how powerful the human touch can be as a means of connection.

And I think about how far I have to go.

(Not that hugging people is necessarily causal or correlative to how I connect with people... but it is something, you know?)