Well, I'm glad I found some fellow introverts - though it was an easy win I think.

I like the Spock comparison: it's the kind of character I look like in real life (minus the pointy ears of course). In the past I was perhaps more like Leonard Hofstadter, but yes, I'm disconnected from my emotions. I don't know why or how it happened though: I didn't do it on purpose. I guess I was traumatized, but I should be long healed now, and the whole point of my quest for "caring" is that I think I'm a good-hearted person, and part of my life would be wasted without emotions. But I don't know how to "restart the engine": is it broken? Does it need fuel? That I don't know and I wish I did.

Of course I can't bore (and scare!) people with such existential questions, that's why I'm here. It's been a long time since I've opened up with strangers on line, and it's a welcome comeback - especially because this time it's in English, a language I love.

I agree that introversion is often confused with shyness, and I'm amazed about how little understanding there is about who we introverts are, and how we're different. For my first 28 years or so I was so imbued with with wrong judgments that I didn't even understand myself because people around didn't understand me. Then I started not to care anymore, and then after some reading came the epiphany.

I think it's great being an introvert: now that I know my strengths, I wouldn't want to be anyone else. I think we are the ones who can bring balance and compassion in society. Throw one of us in a group, wait until he gets accepted and starts to count, and watch how he makes things better: that's how I see us folks.

And that's why I want my caring potential back. I've had enough of learning for learning's sake, but I feel really awkward around people nowadays.

Like I said, I want passion, but I can't find any and it's frustrating. Most people are plain dull until you *extort* interesting things out of them (and I don't want to do it), and as for me I've been doing all sorts of cool things lately, like playing keyboards, riding motorcycles, sailing boats, flying planes (see a pattern here? these are all things that take some effort to learn), but alas, not a single one of them is my one real passion.

I somehow envy (it's not true envy because I have no feelings, but it's sort of a "rational" envy) those folks who have a one track mind. They ride motorcycles, and they talk about about motorcycles all the time. But they talk with passion, and people listen to them and like them and care about them, to the point of finding their one-way-mindedness cute and attractive. Me, on the other hand, it's more like “oh, yeah, and I fly planes, too”. But it's not my passion, and sadly (again, in a rational kind of sadness), nothing is.

It's like I've got a lot of good pieces placed on my puzzle, but the most important ones are still laying around somewhere.

Interesting take. Besides, with my "being less delusional" came the thought that lack of communication, disrespect, cheating and the like were pretty much the same back in those legendary times when family values were stronger, but perhaps the real strength was the work of keeping those things covert and making less of a fuss about them. My family does (mostly) have those values, but perhaps we were just lucky.



One idea could be slowing down, in my opinion. I realize I don't need everything I have, so I don't strive for my career, try not to be greedy, keep an eye on my impact on the environment, and in general I have these golden rules:

1. try not to harm others
2. try to be well
3. if you can do good to others without losing too much, do it.

These rules pretty much cover most of my day-to-day life, and I'm often surprised by how little it takes to make someone happier. I'm not a big dispenser of smiles, but I always listen and that often helps.

I second that Gimp is great: I've been using it since I've been using Linux (we're talking about 1998, that's 12 long years) but I reckon it can be very awkward to use for a total newbie. Especially on a Mac it can be very frustrating because you have to click twice every time you switch windows (and you do so very often), on Windows it's ok because you don't have to click twice, and on Linux with the "focus follows mouse" option turned on it's just perfect.

It's like a little Photoshop for free, and although it's no Photoshop, the list of features is impressive for its price. It's got everything you need for web graphics, and then some! And I actually do all of my amateur web graphic work with it.

I'll be honest: to me, beauty is like a factor in a multiplication of other (changing) things, but beauty is always there.

So if

attraction = beauty * (kindness + smarts + honesty + wits + whatever else I feel considering)

then if beauty = 0, no luck with me. All the other things can and do often compensate, but if beauty isn't there for at least a slight little bit, then I don't just "play hard to get", I make it clear that I'm "impossible to get".

Sadly though I make myself subject to the same rule, and being that I am not that great marvel to look at (just to use the euphemism of the day), then when I see that a girl doesn't find me handsome enough (which is always), I quit showing off everything else -- so I can at least avoid becoming a pet-boyfriend, which isn't exactly my favorite occupation in my spare time.

Although I didn't suffer any losses (except losing my best friend when I was 15 and that prevented me from being a completely healthy teenager), I could say I have a similar experience in about the same time frame.

About 6 years ago I had to end the relationship with my first and only girlfriend and it felt like ripping my hear out with my own hands, then shortly later I met another girl I liked, a single mom with a 6 year old daughter. The girl was fine, but it was the daughter I really fell in love with - to the point when the mother would say “let's go to the disco” and I'd reply ”let's stay home and play with the little girl”. Seeing that, even her parents welcomed me in the family in no time and I even liked them too, so it felt like winning the lottery, and being somehow "refunded" from my past relationship I invested so much in.

The only problem was that she didn't like me so I had to end it again, and it felt like ripping my heart out again. Meanwhile I lost my job because with all this stuff going on I can't really say I was spot-on, and of course instead of understanding, my bosses threw me away - not by doing so officially (they couldn't by contract) but by compelling me to relocate 1000 km away. All this in just about 3 months. Like I said in another post, I felt annihilated.

Then, many things changed in my head: most for the better, some for the worse.

I spent 6 months alone and unemployed, only going to see my family once every two weeks or so. My alone time wasn't bad though: I spent my time studying, I had some job interviews but I turned many jobs down because I wasn't in a rush to find another sucky job, and I started cultivating a relationship with a former crush's boyfriend who was so cool he quickly became my best friend. We were so close we even started thinking about doing business together, but then some incomprehensions creeped in, and I had to cut that relationship as well. That time, though, it didn't feel like ripping my heart out because I was getting kinda used to it.

At that point I decided to seriously go get a new job, as soon as I found a decent one my professional life "rebooted", I could put all I had been studying to good use and every time I went to a job interview, *I* was deciding, not the other way around. Since then I've had 3 jobs, I was hired without hesitation every time, and when I quit it was on my own decision, because I wasn't satisfied. I grew very confident of my skills.

On the other hand, though, I never had neither a date nor even a close friend since. I became as picky with relationships as I was with jobs, and still am to this day. I'm very quick to think “she's not interested”, very slow to make friends (I'm nice to pretty much anybody, but I never go seek anyone and instead wait for people to seek me), and as if that weren't enough, I'm thinking about quitting my job again because despite my colleagues loving me for solving so many problems, I think my boss is an idiot and only uses me for 1/3 of my potential.

So what did I become? I don't feel unhappy, but I seriously feel something is greatly out of balance. My job is my only source of happiness, I'm actually *glad* when monday comes (not that I don't like weekends, I just work on other things), and I haven't got a single significant relationship be it a friendship or -god forbid- a date. I feel like I've become a machine, and as a machine I can't really feel sad about it, but at least I can tell it's wrong because I'm supposed to be a human being.

But today, as soon as some feeling is implicated, I just go numb. I listen to people, usually make them feel at ease, but they can feel that despite my availability to listen to them, I don't really care anymore. I don't really know how they feel about it, but on the other hand, I don't really care either.

Last but not least, last year I had an accident with my motorbike, broke my wrist badly, and ended up with some permanent damage. Today I have a hard time playing my keyboards because of that, but I'm thinking I'm cool with it: all in all, it's just some physical damage preventing me to do something that I used to enjoy. It's not the worst thing in life: in retrospective, my emotional damage is much older and much worse.

Malware on Linux is a whole different beast compared to its counterpart in Windows.

The good news is that it's much harder to get a Linux computer infected.

The bad news is that when that happens, it's usually *much* worse.

Yep, there's been a time in my life when I realized the "fakeness" of many things I took for granted.

It dawned on me one day when I was traveling in Germany with my parents: my mother insisted that I go to church, even though neither of us spoke a single word of German, “because it's right to sacrifice an hour of your time to God”, she said.

Yeah, right. To me it felt like *wasting* an hour of my time without being able to learn anything useful (granted that what you can learn in a mass is of any use if you have a bit of compassion and common sense), and worst of all it felt like being subjugated. Since that day I had the clear perception of the "fakeness" of how most people in Italy -and elsewhere- live their christianity. Some time and some more thought later in fact I became an atheist (technically I'd be agnostic, but I do get pissed off when people try to get me into believing into whichever imaginary friend in the sky).

I don't reject christian values, actually I live by most of them. But they are *my* values, *I* chose them, because *I* think they're good. Not because I feel compelled by some sticky sick sense of guilt that I have to purge by “sacrificing one hour of my time” every week. And since I have no god, I am a happier person.


The same, I guess, goes for family values: I know what respect, listening and understanding are, and I think that a family should be based on that.

Alas, I also feel most people don't want to take the time to get to know and listen and understand each other, and are drawn to somehow fit a schedule instead.

Well, thanks: it means I'm only one word away from feeling fine.



I think I know the drill, heard it so many times... and it's not that I don't believe it's true, but just that there are so few decent (i.e. successful) role models for people "like me" (i just wrote another post explaining what I mean so I won't repeat myself -- and I quoted you there)


BUT. Experience is a heartless and inflexible teacher, and I would really like to someday disregard what she's been teaching me all these years. So, when a girl tells me things like “I want to feel you really care”, I would like to think “she's got the hots for me” instead of “she wants me to be her next pet-boyfriend”.

Any suggestions?


EDIT: fixed a typo. I really hate typos.

... because I'm not so sure I'd be worth a relationship anymore.

I tend to agree and, being Italian, I'd like to see the Americans' take on this. I used to picture us Italians much more old-fashioned than Americans (y' know, family values and all that), but I think we're sadly catching up on the over-stressed lifestyle.

Or maybe I'm just growing up and being less delusional, and those family values never were real in the first place.

Hi guys.

I just joined and have been reading around for the past couple of hours, getting a glimpse of the faces and the minds behind them, and hoping to find a good spot for the "question" I want to ask, but I didn't find any perfectly suitable existing topic, so here I am boldly opening one as my first post.

The thing is, I'm an introvert. I've been like this clearly since age 6, but I only recently really understood what being an introvert really means. It means being part of a minority, it means my brain works pretty differently compared to most people, it means a lot of "big" things like that. Until recently I didn't know these things, tried to behave like an extrovert (i.e. like most people out there), failed miserably, and suffered a lot.

So when I discovered that being an introvert is not a condition but an orientation (kind of like being gay, but a lot subtler), I was relieved: I'm not sick, I'm not an alien, it's ok to not like the crowds, the noise, the small-talk, the sports, the excitement, whatever - it's just that we're thinkers and we enjoy quiet.

Back in the day when I still hadn't had this epiphany, I used to want a girlfriend "like everyone else", couldn't get one because no girl wants an unactractive, nerdy, needy boyfriend who tries hard to be fun and outgoing and fails miserably, so I've been a wreck for a *very* long time (let's say until I hit 26).

Then I found a gorgeous girl who liked me for who I am, I was totally committed, but the relationship didn't last long (I'll spare the gloomy details) and my heart was pretty much annihilated. That was 6 years ago.

Most people recover from a failed relationship in a couple months, for introverts like me it may require a tad bit longer, but 6 years is a heck of a lot of time, too much by any standards.

And I want my life back.

Back in the day, I used to think I was the best guy around: everybody told me I was smart, everybody told me I was nice, I was many people's best confident... and of course I couldn't figure out why I wasn't on any girl's radar despite being so very great.

Today I have a different view of myself. I think that I unwillingly "sold" a lof of BS to a lot of people for most of my life: my "niceness" really was just the reflection of my christian education (I'm Italian, we've got the Pope in our backyard) so once I figured that out I rejected the big pile of BS and tried hard to be just my true self. Too bad I don't have the slightest clue about the whole "true self" thing: I've always been someone else, programmed to be nice. I've always been a fraud, even to myself.

But I know I want to be a "caring" man: because I know I can, because I feel I want it, and because I feel good when someone feels good thanks to me.

I don't know how to do it, though. I've completely lost touch with *all* my feelings. My soul dwells in utter darkness. I'm not sad, I'm not depressed, of course I'm not happy either: it's just dark. I have a job I like very much, so much that I enjoy making my co-workers like it too: I like to give my best so they can smile in gratitude. I don't like the praise, I just like the smiles.

I'm not a lost soul: there really are good things in my life -- but I want the old fire back.

Like everyone, I want intimacy. Unlike everyone, I can do without almost fine for a very long time. I want my passion back, and I want others to feel it -- a true passion this time, not the "nice guy" programming. I've learnt from my mistakes and I think I'm ready, but I feel like there's one last important thing left to learn, and I don't know what it is.

So I was just wondering if there were any people like me, but who already managed to sort things out and turned to be happy introverts. Any direction would be appreciated, 'cause you know, once you've found out you're not who you think you were, it feels like it's pitch dark.

Sorry if I took a non-negligible amount of your time, but I said what I had to say and I promise my next posts *will* be shorter. On the other hand, I thank you for having read this far: if you haven't cheated by skipping to the last line, I really do appreciate the "care".


One last thing though: I looked at MelodyGirl's profile (because she's an active member of course, not just because she looks awesome) and found this:

«WHY AM I SINGLE? I don't want baggage, dysfunction, or drama in my life. It's OK to be single until a person finds the right one for them. I don't understand why people think they NEED love or to have a relationship. Be comfortable and successful alone - then ask someone to join you in life.»

Now THAT's enlightening. I'll be thinking about it in the next few days, but that made me feel kinda good.