Meeting someone new, feels a bit strange these days. I was always unapologetic about who I was, in some regards, but it feels like in the past I also had a vision of who I wanted to present myself as. That "mask" was an important part of my self-concept, you could even say that I specifically sought out social spaces where I could don it. But this, too, seems to be a part of myself that I have lost, had stolen, or simply faded in its former brightness. There is such a thing as trying to hard to be perfect; when someone takes issues with your flaws in a way that is hurtful, does it really do you any good to hide them away?

On one hand, perhaps it allows me to be more nonchalant, less anxious, more true to the day to day experience of myself. It's a similar thing that happened with my music production process -- there's not as much of a pressure for getting everything "perfect", because it's an understood part of the process that there will be good days and bad days. So, maybe it's the same when it comes to first impressions, as well. There is both so much but also so little that you can know about someone by meeting them. No words, no labels, could hope to convey a fraction of the meaning and substance that a life holds.

There was an annoying dinner conversation I overhead once (annoying I think not because of what the person was saying, but because of the know-it-all attitude they seemed to be conveying it with) about how people ("women"?) say / think they want someone funny, charming, sincere, but really they want to be with and interact with someone who knows how to be all of those different things, at the "right" times. I don't really think I agree with that framing either, but I do think that the more I learn about who people are the harder it is to boil them down into absolutes. Maybe it is because myself and the people around me in my age group have become more well-rounded individuals, but it is hard to look at someone anymore and just say "they are quiet" or "they are funny" or "they are nice". I guess describing people is difficult in general.

It should make me feel as if I have more depth to who I am, but strangely enough, it makes me feel like there is less. I staked what I had of my life and existence on being certain ways -- I min-maxed myself to the extremes, and even the outcomes were questionable in the end, at least I was sure of it. Now, things are different...though, perhaps not as different as they might seem. The overall goings-on of my life are still dictated by routine, it just seems more...mechanical than lived. That is not to say mechanical in a lifeless sense, more that it is fixed machinery that is simply working as intended. I guess my life still somehow revolves around things that were lost to the past, the difference is that before they felt "real" enough that I could grasp onto the threads with my hands and fingers. Now, they are simply lost to me. I'm not sure I know what being in love feels like other than something that hurts.