Feedback

I received some interesting feedback over the weekend, and being the tightly wrapped kind of guy I am, I'm compelled to respond.  I'll paraphrase what I heard...


"For an introvert, the guy really puts himself out there"
That's a very valid comment, and it's not actually something I've thought a lot about.  In thinking about responding two things came to mind:

1. Introverted Writers - Emily Dickinson would sit in her room and write incessantly about how she was feeling and how she perceived the world around her.  Now her work wasn't published until after her death, but who knows...had she been alive today, maybe all of that work would be appearing on an obscure blog on-line somewhere in cyber-space.  I guess for her the act of writing was somehow therapeutic, and I know it is for me.  Granted her fingernail shavings had more talent than which exists in my entire body, but it's the underlying thought that counts. Anyway, writing in a public forum for me is not an awful lot different than the classroom teaching/facilitation I do professionally in that it allows me to extrovert in a "safe" manner.  In the classroom I can play extrovert and be comforted in the fact that I am in control of the situation and that it eventually ends (and I can then collapse into a blob of introvert gelatin); in writing I can choose what to say and how to say it.  For an introvert, it's all about being able to control how I chose to share.
2. Subjects - I write about the things I'm interested in at the moment.  If my personal focus is more external, then I write about politics, religion, etc.  When personal issues dominate what I'm thinking, it then spills out here.  I've purposefully tried to write about more external things when I'm in the midst of dealing with some personal issue, but it usually doesn't work out so well.  

It's all about me I suppose, but that's okay.  We all need some things in our life what are "all about us".


I also was told that the profile picture I had was not the most flattering, so I've made a change.  Never let it be said that I don't listen...on occasion.  The new picture is probably one of the best I've ever appeared in; the back story is that it was taken in 2004 (when I had much nicer hair) when I was with my girls at the apple orchard.  I loved taking the girls to the farm in the Fall.  Maybe one day (years and years and years from now) I'll have grandchildren to take apple picking.