Experimentation

[pandora_parrot]

One of the things that has really challenged me in my life is the ability to describe what it is that I'm experiencing. I generally find that my internal experiences are hard to map onto symbols and metaphors that I can describe to folks. And by being better able to describe it to others, I can more accurately describe it to myself and consider how it works in my life.

One of the big problems I've had with this is in terms of discovering a new concept, idea, project, hobby, or whatever to get interested in. In the past, I've tended to adopt such bits of stuff as my identity. "I'm a skateboarder" I'd say after a month or two of skateboarding. It made me unhappy to see myself constantly describing things as part of my identity only to have them become less interesting and appealing after a while.

So in the fall of last year, I came up with a new way of describing my newfound interests to myself and others: experiments. I haven't become a wow player. I'm experimenting with WoW. I haven't become a barefooter. I'm experimenting with barefooting. That's a far more accurate way to render things and gives them the proper weight when describing them.

I tend to have a lot of such experiments going on at any given moment in time, and I tend to launch myself into such things with intensity and glee. Because, simply put, they are rather important to me in the way they work. :)

Comments

[pouchedfox.livejournal.com]

that makes sense, I think we are both trying to define ourselves, both coming from environments that limited us orriginally, and now being able to suddenly express our gender and thoughts and ideas more openly we are looking for ways to describe and understand what it means to be us more.

[labelleizzy.livejournal.com]

I like this "experimenter" model very much.
I also like the "intensity and glee" feature.