Board Thread:Season 51 - The Caribbean/@comment-35624472-20190225211204/@comment-30289320-20190226075834

Ayy Karsten - before I get into this, I have to ask. When you said you didn't know how to communicate with me earlier in the game, is that why you ended up sending me stuff like "360 noscope assblast 69" or whatever that was? LOL. My friend thought you saw "Datboi" and were trying to appeal to me with memes or something, but my own theory at the time was that you were doing drugs. A lot of drugs. I do kind of like the idea of the one old man of the game trying to relate to the other old man using memes, though. Joking aside, I'll get right into your questions so you don't need to read a book here:

'''Did you have an actual issue making connections with people? Is it something you struggled with or am I going to be strategic by ignoring people. And if you did have trouble, why did you have trouble? Was it a life committment issue, was it a culture issue of the community, etc?'''

I am glad that we did eventually connect. I'm curious to hear what your theory on it is, but outside of the issues I’ve mentioned already with juggling school & a freelance thing, and then also this game during early merge with 10+ people trying to talk to me, I'll be real here for a minute. I was diagnosed with Social Anxiety Disorder a couple years ago, where I was old enough that it would be difficult to treat without medicine or a lot of therapy. I'm glad to say it's not TOO life altering or anything and has gotten better, but I still do struggle with this, especially with new people. A lot of the times I'm just kind of a mess socially in real life outside of things I'm used to, like paying for groceries, having an intense conversation about the weather with a roommate, or talking to friends I've known for a long time.

Online, some aspects of SAD carry over and some don't. There's less inhibition to converse and contribute to a conversation so a lot of times people don’t really notice my symptoms at all. But this has, for years now, made it very difficult to be the first one to message people. Just like in real life, I know it’s irrational to be thinking “They don’t want to hear from me” or “I’ll be annoying them if I message right now” but it doesn’t make those thoughts go away. I have to force myself to just do it, but when it’s earlier in the merge and I’ve already been talking to a lot of people that day and I’m trying to work on an assignment, it’s just really difficult for me. I suspect this more than anything is largely what contributed to the whole “Hasn’t messaged me in days” thing because even with my real life friends, if they don’t reach out to me first I usually will just assume they’re busy even if I can see them online. It's the usual suspect.

Anyway, it’s not an excuse for a bad social game if that’s the case, but there’s my explanation. I hate that Facebook would tell people I was reading things when I was just checking while working on something due the next morning, but it is what it is. While I tried to turn my busyness into a positive by prioritizing my time between certain players, it’s really just something for the most part I had no control over, and if that loses me the game, then hey, I’ll still be happy knowing I tried hard despite real life circumstances. I do think, however, that I put the effort in when I did have time, and it seemed that for the most part people liked me, aside from me being busy a lot. My social game may not have been A+ material, but it was good enough to contribute to having people like Andrea or Natalia want to keep me over Bradley, and it was good enough for me to do just about everything I wanted to do in this game. I was never difficult to reach aside from when I was asleep and would always make sure to organize things so I could be very active around voting deadlines.

It would be amazing to say it was all some genius 360 noscope masterplay, but yeah, it was more about me knowing what my shortcomings would be this season and planning my game around them. I would not have been available time-wise enough to play a very overt game like Yousef, or practice for every challenge like Ethan. I instead played my own type of game, got myself to the end, and still seem to have at least some shot to win against someone much higher in visibility. Honestly, win or lose, I’m proud of that.

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I’ll answer your other questions after some sleep!