The first time I walked into a SENG conference, unsuspecting and unintended, I was blindsided by an aching earnestness like none I had ever known. It beckoned a sort of authenticity I had eschewed nearly a lifetime ago. The feasible divulgence of the complexity & intensity with which nearly all things are regarded was a far cry from the contrived communication I had spent my youth perfecting—always customizing my message for each audience, to flatter or humor or offend, to enlarge or defy or extend—everything engineered like an elaborate game of chess, but only ever with a modicum of the truth, if any. In this shocking, shining moment of epiphany, I realized that I might be experiencing the sensation of community the majority of the human species feels when it enters a grocery store or a concert, a school or a soccer match, an affinity with a population of like-kind, the resonating commonality of residing within the safe hollow of the bell. We who rim the edge are left raw and alone, dramatically separated by the rarity of each other, and pressed to distrust the realities we experience, as the remainder of our species defies our sensations and denies our awareness. We learn to translate our assessments into tones with lesser vibrational spectrum, and endeavor to hear them as if they are our native tongue. But here I was, having stumbled in from the urgent curtailed terseness of digital to the palatial broadness of analog (and a potentially infinite beyond). This was the moment I had spent my life reticently relinquishing hope for; This was the moment I regained the freedom to be alive, and the privilege to be—unfettered & unabashedly—me.
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