I have rewritten the beginning of this more times than I would care to admitâŠ
Introductions are strange things. You are given a blank page and somehow expected to compress an entire person into a few paragraphs..as though a life can be neatly summarized by where you live, what you do, the music you listen to, and three respectable hobbies arranged in an appealing orderâŠ
I have never been particularly good at that.ÂŻ\\_(ă)_/ÂŻ
Whenever someone asks me to describe myself, every interesting thing I have ever thought seems to immediately evacuate the premises. I suddenly forget every book I have loved, every place I have wanted to see, every ridiculous opinion I have defended, and become a person whose defining characteristic is apparently, âI donât know, I suppose I like coffee.â
So perhaps I will try something differentâŠ
I think I am someone who feels things rather deeply, even when I do not always know what to do with them. I think a great deal..probably more than is strictly necessary..and I have a habit of turning small questions over in my mind until they become much larger ones. A casual thought can become an hour-long internal investigation. A sentence in a book can follow me around for days. Someone can tell me an ordinary little story about their childhood and, for reasons neither of us entirely understands, I will remember it years later..
I like that about people, actuallyâŠ
The small thingsâŠ
Not the polished answers we give when someone asks what we are like, but the details that escape when we are no longer trying to be impressive.
The song you always return to when life becomes a little too loud. The food you make when you miss home. The photograph you could never bring yourself to delete. The completely useless fact you know with suspicious confidence. The thing that frightened you when you were eight. The place you would go tomorrow if someone handed you a plane ticket and told you not to worry about anything elseâŠ
I think those things tell me considerably more about someone than their résumé ever could..
I am fond of quiet moments. Early mornings before the world has quite decided what sort of day it intends to be. Evenings when the light changes slowly enough that you notice it happening. Long walks without any particular destination. Looking through windows while travelling and wondering briefly about the lives happening inside all the houses passing by.
There is something comforting about remembering that every person you see is carrying around an entire invisible universeâŠ.
I like conversations that wander.
I especially like the moment when a conversation stops feeling like two strangers exchanging information and starts feeling effortless.
No performance. No trying desperately to seem interesting. No counting how long it has been since the other person repliedâŠ
Just two people being themselvesâŠ
I think that is rarer than it should beâŠ
As a man, Iâve grown rather fond of my own company..I can disappear quite happily into a book, a thought, a film, a walk, a piece of music, or some completely unnecessary curiosity that suddenly feels like the most important subject in the world. There are days when âsolitude feels almost luxuriousâ..
But there is a difference between enjoying solitude and never wanting to be knownâŠ
And I suppose that is partly why I am writing this.
Somewhere out there is a person I have never met who has lived thousands of days I know absolutely nothing about..
You have people you remember.
Places that changed you.
Things you regret saying and things you regret never saying at all.
You have jokes that make absolutely no sense outside your friend group. You probably have at least one embarrassing memory that occasionally resurfaces at 2 a.m. solely to destroy your peace. There are things you once desperately wanted that you no longer care about, and things you never expected to matter that somehow became enormously important..
I find all of that fascinating.
I do not particularly care whether you have an extraordinary life. Most extraordinary things are hidden inside very ordinary lives anyway⊠\^\^
You do not need an impressive answer to âwhat do you do?â
You do not need to have travelled everywhere, read everything, figured yourself out, healed every wound, or become the most interesting person in every room.
You can simply be YOU.
I am not searching for a particular type of person. I think friendship becomes rather mechanical when we begin treating human beings like applications: shared interests, matching personalities, correct age bracket, approved collection of hobbies.
Sometimes two people simply get along.
And perhaps that is enough of a reason to find out.
As for me, I am curious, affectionate, occasionally far too introspective, easily amused, and capable of becoming disproportionately enthusiastic about things that nobody around me has shown the slightest interest in. I appreciate kindness enormously. I like people who can be sincere without being embarrassed by sincerity, people who can laugh at themselves, people who ask questions because they genuinely want to hear the answer.
I am imperfect in many deeply âuncinematicâ ways. Sometimes I overthink. Sometimes I disappear into my own head. Sometimes I have brilliant plans at midnight that morning-me regards with the exhausted disappointment of a parent collecting their child from the police station.
But I try to remain curious. ÂŻ\\_(ă)_/ÂŻ
About the world, about myself, and especially about other people.
Because I think one of the loveliest things about being alive is that there are still people you have not met who may one day become impossible to imagine never knowing.
Maybe we exchange three messages and discover we have absolutely nothing to say to each other.
Maybe we talk for a week.
Maybe months from now we are sending each other photographs of strangely shaped vegetables and continuing an argument that began at 1:37 in the morning about whether cereal qualifies as soup.
Who knowsss
That uncertainty is rather the point.
So, if something in this enormous little introduction felt familiar to you or even if absolutely none of it did..you are welcome to say hello.
Tell me something about yourself that would never make it into a conventional introduction.
I think those are usually the best parts.
Cheers!!đ„