Lack of personal posts

So why don't I write more personal stuff? It would be interesting and refreshing to post more about what's going on inside my head: The emotions and the analyses. I very much appreciate the glimpses provided by such introspective writers as rigel and coffeebeanben. And I certainly spend enough time in my head to have things to write about.

However, the things about which I would write are not purely internal to me; they involve other people. (I hope, but do not necessarily expect, that you will forgive my arrogance in saying that I have long ago resolved all of my big internal issues.) When I wonder about other people, posting on LJ is a poor substitute for actually speaking to them. It would be a rude substitute even, if I haven't yet made the attempt. But sometimes interaction isn't verbal. For their comfort, for mine, or to avoid pushing things toward an unnecessary resolution, much communication remains in the nonverbal subtext. So even though I may understand the situation and circumstances, the details are impossibly hazy. A patchwork of guesses and hints can build up to a reliable big picture, but any particular feature of it may be wrong. And because that sort of interaction is so slow and nebulous, even if I could say anything about it with certainty, it would be in the past tense.

Then, there are simple observations about other people's interactions. Some of these have been very interesting, and would make better subject matter than my hikes do. Yet I am doubtful that even a friends-locked post would do justice to the privacy of another's thoughts, even given that those thoughts were unintentionally broadcast to any observant person who happened to be watching.

Sadly, both of these restrictions limit how publicly I can describe some events, where those are causally linked to these topics.

Edit: Oh, there's also the subject of hopes and dreams. I generally don't even talk about those, except for the more impersonal ones such as my (pipe dream) intentional community in Canada with cruelty-free farms, off-grid, renewable energy, and no cars. My personal hopes and dreams are more of a "black box" deal. This is because I am a romantic dreamer, and most dreams have a tendency to not come true. I can acknowledge them to myself, and even maintain enough hope to allow for the chance that whatever they are might really come to pass. But, just like emotions, talking about them makes them more real. In the case of hopes, that strongly increases the emotional investment I have in them. Disappointment is easy to deal with if I do not allow myself to get too emotionally invested in an unlikely hope. I know from experience that it royally sucks otherwise.

This isn't to say that I stay emotionally cold toward my dreams. Actually, I push myself about as far into them as I can until I intuit that going any farther will be extremely dangerous. This way, when something really good does happen, I am ready to derive from it all of the joy and happiness that it has to offer. I occasionally even do talk about my hopes and dreams, when they are significant enough, but only with perhaps one to three people. It's an emotional min/max situation, where I have the advantage of being able to accept and downplay the negative, and to enthusiastically and graciously appreciate the positive. So the romantic dreamer part of me carries more weight than the realist, but the realist shows up more in my public face.