I spend so much time with screens around me now. At work we have an iPad interface. I’m often to be found in front of a computer with my phone right beside it. I read somewhere that even when your phone is on the black screen, it is still distracting from whatever you’re trying to do if it’s visible. Still, I try to spend as much time as I can without a screen right there with me. Sometimes I venture out of the house without my phone! It makes me feel like Robinson Crusoe. Sometimes I leave my phone in my jacket, and my jacket hanging up in the office, when I’m at work.

Shyness is a funny thing. Sometimes I meet someone who acts very stand-offish, and someone will say “oh they’re just shy”. That doesn’t seem like shyness, it seems like they’re too cool. I recently met someone who referred to themselves in a song as being “so shy”, but when I spoke to them they wouldn’t stop talking. Maybe what they really mean is that they’re self-conscious. I used to be very shy, hardly speaking really unless it was to someone I knew well. I guess that changed because it simply will have to where I grew up - dinner parties are actually part of curriculum. So then I became talkative but self-conscious. I guess I was exactly what I was describing earlier in a holier-than-thou manner. Now I’m less self-conscious, because at a certain age you just stop attempting to be cool.

Actually it’s because of all the love and acceptance I’ve received from my true love, and then hard-won from myself, and because of taking some risks in life and seeing how they can result in pain but also un-dreamed-of openings.