crazy how inspired i get by interacting with other people

i tend to feel like i have to invent everything from first principles. but when i talk to other people, i'm like, "wow! that's a lot of surface area for new ideas!"*

with my writing, my impulse is to isolate, and only write things that come from my own mind and aren't colored by anyone else's thoughts. well, maybe that's not exactly true, i do like being inspired, but i often feel like my mind is too spongy, and if i don't take care to do otherwise, i'll absorb others thoughts and then not be able to articulate my own without mentioning theirs. which isn't a bad thing, but feels...less than ideal. 

it's not that i believe anyone has to or can be entirely original without ever being inspired by others. in fact, i think the opposite. but it's like when i self-produced a little album on bandcamp back in high school: i did every single part of the process myself, because figuring out how to give credit or payment—i didn't have any money and wanted to sell the album to raise money to study abroad, and it felt bad to profit on someone else's work without paying them, even if they would agree to it—was more trouble than it was worth. 

i think another reason i try to keep everything "in-house" so to speak is that naming others feels...personal? vulnerable? i'm not exactly sure why. this blog, for example, is under the same pseudonym as my twitter account (and so is my youtube and tiktok). but for some reason, naming twitter people in this new context feels quite strange. i thought maybe writing that out would illuminate some more reasons why, but that's all i got for now. it just feels weird. i guess one other point is that despite being so active and open on the internet, i'm actually quite a private person, and lots of things feel oddly uncomfortable to bare to an unfamiliar context. 

because of this approach, i can get super in my head and lost in my own ideas, in a way that disconnects me from lots of other things i might have new thoughts on. or in other words, i may stray from articulating things we all experience, which is an area i definitely would like to articulate. i do love describing my own stuff of course, but there's something particularly delicious about connecting it to a more universal experience. 

when i hear others' thoughts, and especially when i get a chance to riff with them, it's like entire new domains open up in my minds, with entirely new thoughts and connections and feelings. and all of a sudden i have this entire idea for a blogpost that just spills out of me, rather than trying to pull it out with effort. 

the impetus for this post, by the way, was a comment left on my previous post, in which i asked for comments if anyone is actually reading my posts. ege replied and shared some of his own blogposts where he had mentioned my writing. he has been experiencing similar things in his blog-writing endeavor, noticing as i have that less than daily frequency results in ever more friction, aptly stating, "Pausing harmed the process and only cure was doing more." it was great to read another blogger's thoughts about the process, and i was also inspired by him naming his inspirations, rather than vaguely gesturing at them as i tend to do. 

it is quite interesting that i have more of an aversion to linking other things when blogging; i don't seem to have that problem at all on twitter. in fact i quite enjoy quote tweeting and interweaving. 

anyway, i very much enjoy interacting with others and seeing how it leads me down paths i wouldn't have pondered otherwise. 

*while writing this post, my fiancé came and asked me what i was writing about. this paragraph is verbatim how i described it to him, which feels like a great example of how my writing changes when i interact with other people. in this case, i more succinctly summed up the idea, which i perhaps wouldn't have remembered to do if i hadn't articulated it to him out loud.