Getting over my fear of voice chat (and mild depression) & Bridging Worlds

I can’t really say it’s a fear, it’s more of a reluctance. I’ve planned on speaking on voice chat on discord for months and still hadn’t gotten around to it. There is the fact that I am a child of the AOL generation, I sent messages online as a main means of digital communication before I had a phone of my own.

It also had something to do with depression. Not depression in a the diagnose and drug-me-up kind of way, because I refuse to let a doctor tell me I’m depressed in a world where people are basically expected to work 40 hours a week for companies that don’t care about them. It was more of a lack of energy and becoming accustomed to functioning within hat low-energy state. By this definition maybe 90% of people are depressed. Honestly I think they are and it says more about our culture than it does about any individual.

poof

Anyways I was functioning on that vibration for a year. I hadn’t always been so slothful but something about passing 30, having no money or resources to do as I pleased, and not having a community to be part of in my daily life (as we’ll as physical issues) Left me feeling drained from the time i ole up I need the morning. The only things I had to look forward to felt months and years away. According to my definition, that is basically a depressed state but it did not call for medication, and I had already reduced the amount of stress in my life to nearly nothing. What it called for was action.

So I finally resolved to make the most of the good days, and focus 100% on writing and music and building some semblance of a community around me. I had resolved to do this befor but much of it was contingent upon being able to open a studio or accomplishing certain specific goal. This time I just resolved to focus on my own energetic state, and learning how to put fuel on the fire through managing my thought process and being in the moment.

It’s been going well and I feel much more able to conjure up the energy to not only get through the day, but to stay focused on my goals and feel fun and excitement always at my disposal, even when my surroundings show no sign of such things.

Yesterday I finally felt the energy to do what seemed so difficult for so many months despite being so very easy. I got on voice chat on discord and had my first chat with some of the good friends I’ve made here. First @warpedpoetic and I chatted, then @macchiata came to join us, @rasamuel popped in for a while and lastly @vincentnijman finally got his wifi together and we chatted one on one for a while.

Why was it so hard, for not only me but for others as well, to use voice chat with people we had typed with so many times? I think it’s anout recalibration. I know who I am and how I express in person, I know how to be myself in a chat room, but I still don’t know who I am with voice chat or on a phone.

A lot of it has to do with culture and I don’t exactly mean the culture differences between any country. Your culture is how you interact with others. It can merge with the personal culture of others and a group of friends or an office or a village develop their own culture. I still haven’t really explored myself in this crypto world, I am still building out a niche for myself and people like me. We’ve got our Be Awesome channel culture but it hasn’t developed beyond text yet, so we were on a new frontier yesterday. I needed to be fully charged to face it because I am not half assed about how I interact with the world. I want to make sure I make other comfortable while still insisting on being who I am. I don’t want to force others to conform to my culture and I will not conform to another’s culture if it doesn’t resonate with me

So it was hard because we are actually building something, not just running our mouths. We are bridging worlds, and I fucking love it!