scribble #1: introduction and social dark matter

I've been reading visa's excellent word vomits and I feel inspired to write more publicly - I've often felt a sense of wanting to express my thoughts and feelings but being blocked by friction, feeling I don't have the right audience, that I don't have the skill to zero in on the thing I actually want to say.
So I'm going to try anyway.
Right now it's 1:20 am and I'm hanging out at F's feeling tired and sleepy and vaguely guilty that I ended up scrolling twitter instead of reading R:EC like I planned and felt would be more nourishing for my brain. I hoped grounding myself in where I am (twisted onto the sofa with my feet up on the wicker chair) would help me think of what comes next but it's not that easy huh?

The interesting thing - and what I keep coming back to - is the dark matter of human society - things you can't say in public because it's socially inappropriate and so you only ever learn under unusual circumstances - or never - or painfully.

I don't mean "politically incorrect culture warry" things (though that has related dynamics), but simply things that, in Keith Johnstone's memorable phrase, would, if we told them to the wrong person, "be like kicking them"

The example F and I discussed was M saying she really likes giving birth (which is itself a misinterpretation of what she actually said) and how you can't really say that to new mom's who might have had a very different experience. Conversely, F also mentioned having a child is much more difficult than parents tell prospective parents, and he's not sure why this particular conspiracy of silence exists.

The other example that comes to mind is J saying that A is actually quite greedy and dishonorable in his business practices, despite his impressive online persona. J would gain absolutely nothing and lose a lot from saying this online or in public, even though this is very useful for the right people to know. And this is something I only learned meeting J in person, though maybe if the subject had come up in our chats he would have mentioned it.

I'm not sure what I'm getting at here. But this kind of selection bias seems to be my personal white whale and I intend to come up with ever more creative ways to get around it.

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