[CLARIFICATION: When I talk about the lack of confidence, it's really only to do with women in these potentially amorous situations. My general confidence is through the roof - public speaking, walking into a room and socializing with everybody - I'm good at that stuff, and I enjoy it. I'm just not good at being confident around ladies I think I might want to Have Something With.]

I wasn't ready for the response. I don't know why I always think the personal posts are the ones people will automatically skip over, but it looks like you people give a damn.

Got your comments, texts, tweets, emails, MySpace messages, Facebook messages, calls, and voicemails.

It was a mix of it's-gonna-be-all-right, don't-let-her-get-away, and what's-with-the-fear messages.

The first thing I ought to say is that I'm more or less OK. I went through a bad period during which I didn't post or respond to communications. When I'm in the middle of a big emotional mess, I withdraw. I get overwhelmed by the incoming messages. I don't post because I'll probably just write a lot about what I'm going through. I don't think you want to read that, and I don't want to write it - when I write about emotional craziness, it makes it harder for me to deal with it. I focus on it and then overthink it all. The result is that the problem becomes bigger in my head - gets blown out of proportion. I've learned over the years, and particularly over the past six or seven months, to keep to myself when feeling this way.

I've also learned to take my attention elsewhere. Working on abstract creative projects helps to clear my mind and keep everything in perspective. One of my goals for the summer is to have an acoustic set together and then to play out. To get that done, I've been playing guitar for anywhere from one to four hours a day. It's great therapy - I love the process, and, because of the nature of music, you don't get the chance to stop and dwell on more concrete issues.

The other medium into which I disappear nowadays is video. I just finished a rough cut of the trailer for the Mini Cooper modification performance shop project thing I've got going on. Hours and days fly by while I'm editing. I love it. I love it, I love it, I love it. And, this time, I got to edit together a car chase between a Porsche 993 Turbo and a Stage IV Mini Madness Cooper. I had never done anything like it. I want to do more. Getting to choose the shots and control the pace of the action was so much fun. When I get a tighter version of the trailer together, I might post it here. We'll see.

Now... to the fear.

While I couldn't possibly explain it all, I thought about it quite a bit this week, and I can at least highlight a few of the things that, for me, contribute to, and keep alive, that fear.

---- Insecurity ----

This one's obvious. We all doubt ourselves. No matter how amazingly gorgeous we are, or how unstoppably charming, we'll never be entirely confident.

For example, although I effect an outward appearance of arrogance and narcissism, the truth is that I feel like an awkward, ugly, inelegant mess. A couple of my close lady friends and I have been discussing this. They want to help me get past my fears. This one, though - my feeling that I'm extremely unattractive - drives them nuts because they think I'm just being dramatic. But, it's the truth.

I never assume that a girl wants anything to do with me beyond friendship. I rarely make the first move when it looks like things are going to move from a friendship to a romantic relationship. I don't make the first move because I don't think she wants me. I wait for an overt, let-me-spell-it-out-for-you signal before I act or respond.

One reason for this is that we can't see ourselves from the outside the way other people see us. And I'm not just talking about being able to see the backs of our heads - I'm talking about the whole package.

Do women think I'm charming? Handsome? Dorky? Bumbling? Creepy? Fake? Genuine?

I don't know, and I always expect the worst. Even when a woman seems to have given me the go-ahead, I think she's made a mistake, and that she'll realize it before long.

It's totally Psych 101, but I think my persona might be my attempt to counter this insecurity.

By faking cockiness and confidence, I almost am. The persona - in the case of this site, Neopoleon - protects The Real Me. As long as I'm Neopoleon, I'm taking chances with someone else's life. Neopoleon can try to court the women, and, once he gets close enough, he passes things over to The Real Me. It's very Cyrano.

That's the idea, anyway. It doesn't work very well. If I want a meaningless fling, it's splendiferous. If I want a meaningful relationship, which is always, it's useless. You can't court someone from behind artifice and then switch back to yourself when you're in and safe.

Take the girl who's been the best/worst thing to have happened to me in ages. We met in 2004. She read my site on and off for a couple years, and loved it. When I moved back to Portland in October, she started calling, and we started hanging out. She progressively got to know The Real Me. When she was finally there, she told me that I can't read my site anymore - that she finds it "disgusting" because of how shallow and conceited Neopoleon is, and how not those things The Real Me is.

Yeah, there's crossover. There's a lot of truth to Neopoleon. It's just that it's a small and exaggerated part of me. The me you meet in a relationship is very different.

So... personas... artifice... a belief that the women don't want me... a belief that I'm ugly...

It's insecurity, and it gets in the way at every point in a relationship. It blocks the beginning, and it causes me to behave poorly in the relationship itself.

---- Trust ----

If you've been betrayed by someone close to you, your ability to trust others is weakened. How much will vary from person to person. It will also vary depending on how often you're betrayed, and how important to you the person is who did it.

My mother can be a horribly abusive person. I grew up being blamed for everything, punished for things I didn't do... I'm not going to go into detail, but it was bad. Overall, she did more things to break my trust than to earn it. I became emotionally self-sufficient very early on. I kept to myself, spending more time with computers than people. I didn't use the words "I love you" with anyone. It wasn't until my late adolescence that I first told my mother I loved her. We had had an argument, and she was in this despair over how things had gone. She was rightly worried that I didn't think highly of her. I told her that I loved her because, although I had known all my life that she was wrong to treat me the way she did, I didn't have any malice toward her. Plus, not telling her that I loved her would have made things worse.

Actually, just remembered another instance - I told my father in 1987 that I loved him. Once.

I didn't do emotion. At least not the good stuff. I could do hurt, sadness, loneliness, and so on. I didn't trust anything else.

After my maternal grandmother died in 2006, I told my shrink that my grandmother was the one person in the world I truly believed loved me, and it was the truth. We grew close during my teen years. Before that, I assumed she disliked me, but spending time with her proved otherwise.

When you don't believe that your grandmother loves you until you've amassed enough data to prove otherwise, it's a good sign that it's extremely difficult for you to trust people.

So, if trusting family members was hard, then what about people who didn't even have a biological obligation to love me (though I didn't believe in that love, I still figured it was there at some level)?

In every relationship I've ever had, I expected Her to walk out on me at some point. Or to betray me. I'd seen enough infidelity growing up to doubt that anybody out there didn't cheat. I've always been faithful - I just don't expect others to be. It's always been this way.

I expect my girlfriends to lie to me. As a few of them could tell you, I was always looking for the lie. She could tell me that she just went out to pick up some groceries, and I'd start wondering who she'd just slept with.

I even have a hard time trusting Normal People - that is, people who are just friends or coworkers. It's hard for me to delegate work because I grew up doing everything on my own. I was the only person I could rely on.

The trust issue is much more complicated than I'm going to be able to communicate here. Just understand that I basically don't trust people.

---- Memory ----

"Forgive and forget" is quite the popular cliche. I can do the first thing, but, unfortunately, not the second.

I have a freakishly good memory. It's not photographic - something for which I'm thankful. I feel sorry for people with photographic memories. Remembering pretty much everything would be awful. I certainly don't want to remember a lot of the stuff I have. Perfect recall (or as close to perfect recall as anyone could have) would be a curse.

"Drink to forget" is a cliche I understand much better. I don't do the first thing, but I've found alternatives. The drugs to which I've always been attracted are the ones that lift depression, calm anxiety, and impair your ability to form new memories. My recollection of my life as a drug addict is hazy, and that's how I want it. Regrettably, I do remember a lot of what happened, but at least it's a mess of tangled images.

Friends and family could tell you how frustrating my memory can be. If you tell me something about yourself - maybe your feelings about infidelity, for example - and if it contradicts something you told me, say, fifteen years ago, I'll call you on it. I'll provide you with the context, the conversation we were having, and, sometimes, the relevant snippets of the conversation.

It can really complicate things. The more inconsistencies someone has, the more work I have to do to resolve them in my mind. I'll wind up having to grill you for information about why you have these behavioral inconsistencies. I'll need to have an explanation for each, and then I have to determine whether or not I believe the explanation, or, if I believe it, how far it goes toward a solution.

Sometimes people get really pissed off at me for it. Something I've learned is that people have an enormous capacity for self-deception. They'll try to modify history to resolve their guilt or shame or whatever, so, when you provide them with information that shows they've tried to rewrite things, they really, really flip out. Like it's my fault that someone can't live with their guilt. And, I ought to clarify, I typically only do this when I'm on the receiving end of someone's crap, and they're justifying what they're doing/saying based on that altered history.

There are many things I don't remember. Routine events such as getting coffee in the morning don't get stored strongly. Yeah, I'll remember, but unless something happens that's worth remembering, I let it go.

Where this fits into relationships is, to be, obvious. When you have a detailed picture of someone's inconsistencies, self-deceptions, infidelities, lies, and so on, you see that someone is capable of just about anything. That person can hurt others, rewrite history, continue on without the burden of guilt, and then do it all over again while believing that he/she is completely in the right.

People change. I've changed over the past two years in ways that I hope are positive. But, still... as much as someone may change, I can't forget everything that came before.

In the case of my mother, I can remember horrible things all the way back to my early childhood. The same goes for other family members. But my mom is the worst. When we're arguing, and when she denies that she ever did anything to hurt me, I respond with The List. I'm guessing she's reading this, and either accepting or denying the validity of what I'm writing. If she were to confront me about it and accuse me of lying - which she's done - I'd probably say something like, "Do you remember the night in 1984 when you were throwing the temper-tantrum, screamed at me, told me you were leaving forever, got in your car, took off in a huff and a puff, came back an hour later, and got right back to screaming at me, this time because you'd just gotten a speeding ticket down by Dunaway Park, and that it was my fault because I had supposedly upset you?" If that isn't good enough, then I'll recite another eight-thousand episodes of many varieties. The more she pushes back, the deeper I'll go into the details.

I haven't spoken to her for months because she finally went overboard and, even for her, did something profoundly hurtful. I tried to work things out - tried to forgive her - but, over and over, she rewrote the past, lied, accused, blamed, etc., until I couldn't take it anymore.

I wrote to her recently to say that I'd like to give this healthy mother/son relationship thing a try again. We'll see. Another problem with a good memory is that bad events don't feel discrete - each builds on all the ones that came before. If she lies to me in a certain way, for example, my reaction isn't going to be proportional to that one lie - it's going to be proportional to all the lies combined.

Some people say that I "keep score." It's not the case, but it looks that way. The reality is that I'm not looking to be Right or to take the moral high ground. What I want is to resolve problems in as unbiased a way as possible. When these events stack up in my head, I don't use them to lord it over someone - I use them to protect myself. If an obvious, negative behavioral pattern is demonstrated, I'm going to walk away.

I have, many times in relationships, gotten extremely mad in response to what the other person thought was a minor offense. She'd wonder why I was so furious about "one lie." It's not because of that one lie - it's because it's another lie in the stack. When it's contested, I'll go down the stack, detailing the lies, and then explaining my position. As with people who rewrite histories, these people go nuts. They feel that it's unfair for me to judge them based on previous transgressions. What a bunch of crap.

Anyway, what my memories tell me is that people don't just hurt each other - they do it so often, in my experience, that it's almost like they want to do it. I have nearly three decades of confusing events in my head. People being nice, then mean, then nice, then mean, then mean again, then continuing with the mean, maybe being nice for a moment, and then getting epically mean.

It scares the crap out of me. I can go back, slip into the moment, often as though it had just happened, and experience the hurt all over again. It happens automatically when someone I'm involved with triggers those memories, typically by adding to them.

With a crappier memory, I wouldn't remember so many of these inconsistencies, lies, abuse, and so on. It would be easier to "forgive and forget" if, like so many other people, I could fill in the blanks with "memories" that make it easier for me to deal with the past.

---- And Other Stuff I Won't Get Into ----

There's so, so much more, but these three things - Insecurity, Trust, and Memory - account for much of my fear.

I'm afraid of women because I've seen so many do so many awful things. It's not to say that men aren't completely assholes, but they're irrelevant to this discussion, so don't freak out, ladies. I'm not saying it's just your sex that's bad news, but it is just your sex that I have to worry about in relationships.

I'm also afraid of women because I don't think they want me. That's the insecurity.

Intimacy... intimacy, for me, is an emotional thing. Physical intimacy is no big deal if I don't care. It's when I do care that it becomes difficult.

Relationships... yeah. How do you have a healthy relationship when you feel the person has made a mistake about being attracted to you, but doesn't realize it yet? Or the trust problem? How can you have a healthy relationship when, based on past experiences, you believe She's going to betray you? How can you have a healthy relationships when you amass a library of memories showing that She's inconsistent about Big Serious Things? Or that show she lies?

It goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on...

It all comes together to leave me utterly freaked out by emotions.

All that said, I'm glad about this most recent experience. Even though I didn't get the girl, I got to feel something. There was passion, desire, affection, adoration, and other things that hadn't made an appearance in my life in ages.

I'm also a little less scared of these things now. This girl and I were both confused, and we both acted inconsistently, but it was also all honest. We never deceived each other. We misled each other, but not maliciously - it was out of conflict of feelings and reason. Neither one of us is in a "good place" for a relationship, but emotions aren't rational.

I've said this a lot lately, but I've been repeating it over and over because it helps me make sense of how reason and emotion can be completely at odds:

You don't get to choose who you fall for. You don't get to choose who you love.

You might think you can, but all you can really do is choose how you're going to handle those emotions.

So, that's what we did. The attraction is there, and we gave into it a little. I wanted to give into it entirely, but she didn't feel comfortable with that, so here we are.

As I was saying, though, this is all good stuff. Having had a positive emotional experience - trust and respect are much more important to me than success - has left me feeling like I don't have to tuck my emotions away again. This whole thing opened the door a little.

I want to do this again. Not with her, as she made it clear that it's not going to happen. I plan to pay attention and keep an open mind - be receptive to situations where there might be the possibility of a relationship. I'm going to try not to let my insecurity get in the way - even though we're not together, she does dig me, and that helps to remind me that, whatever I believe, there are some out there who do think I'm attractive.

Her honesty also gives me a bit of hope. There are girls out there who are more interested in doing what they think is right for the situation rather than just themselves.

Anyway, gotta run. Battery's running out, and I have some errands to attend to. I expect there are a few typos here, and that the usual typo-spotters will let me know if they spot 'em. I'll fix 'em later.

Tah.