Those of you who know me know how much I dislike drawing any attention to myself. If I could move through life as an invisible force, I’d be happy. I get by on the minimal amount necessary to show that I exist, and do my best to hide in the background of any event, class, meeting, whathaveyou.
If you’ve had the opportunity to be in a treatment room with me, you know that it’s not that I don’t have anything worth saying. I never shut up as long as there’s only a couple of people around to hear it. But get more than five people in a room and I prefer to sit back and let others have the spotlight, thanks.
Now, part of that is from the lingering effects of the brain injury suffered from my car accident and the aphasia that becomes more pronounced when I’m excited or nervous. But mostly, I like to be pretty low key and hidden.
A lot of us are like that. It was one of the things that I absolutely loved about TED Talks when they first started - often times the people with some the most important things to say don’t because they like to hide out in the back of the crowd and not draw attention to themselves. But it’s so important for them to get out there and share their knowledge. The things they spend lifetimes learning and discovering often remain hidden in the recesses of their minds unless someone forces them into the spotlight and hands them a microphone.
It’s difficult to measure your accumulated knowledge when you don’t have anything to measure it against. Sure, I know a lot of things, but there are plenty of people who know more than me. And there are so many things I still don’t know. So who am I to speak about anything with any kind of authority? All of the things I know are readily available in journals and websites and books that you can easily access. I just assume that if someone wants to know something, they can look it up.
It’s becoming apparent to me that that’s the wrong perspective to have. And that there are a lot of connections between the material that I’ve read that I have made, but apparently not a lot of others have. So many of us are like that. We live with the accumulated knowledge of our lives work inside our heads all day every day. We forgot that other people don’t know this stuff. And it’s so important that we all feel comfortable sharing what we know. Because together, we know a lot of stuff.
So I’m going to start posting here some stuff about things. And maybe you’ll like what you read. And maybe it’ll spur you to do some more research on your own. And maybe it’ll just be interesting to read about the inner workings of my mind from time to time. But tread carefully, for the night is dark and full of terrors, and so too is my mind… bwahahaha!