Sinan Writes This

Cripplingly Shy

Today - well, yesterday as I’m typing this up at 5am, thank you fucking erratic sleep cycle - was the first day of this year’s Eurogamer Expo. And it was very fun. I got a good interview, played a few games, met a few people, and listened to Peter Molyneux make spectacular comment after spectacular comment.

Afterwards Lewis Denby, who’s currently sleeping on my sitting room floor or secretly playing on my PC and replacing all my game save files with mp3s of himself laughing - you never know - took me along to the Rock Paper Shotgun meet at a local pub. There were plenty of great people there, very talkative, very interesting and I did have a swell time meeting the whole scope of personality that was there.

But it rammed home to me one of my serious problems I have, both in terms of progressing within a career of games criticism and just as a regular old human being - I am cripplingly shy. I am terribly self-conscious, I find it so hard to just introduce myself into a conversation without feeling like a loser. I’m always worried I’m going to say the wrong thing, make a faux pax, generally arse it all up.

It’s at things like Eurogamer where I really need to get over it. I should be able to see, say, Kieron Gillen and not be intimidated. I should want to go over to Peter Molyneux and shake his hand. I should work my butt off to try and grab some time with the Eurogamer boys and girls. Instead, I worry and type up self-absorbed blog posts at 5 o clock in the morning.

I’m being very harsh on myself, I know - I think typing it out is cathartic, but also I’m just trying to give myself a kick up the arse. I want to be better at networking and socializing. One’s a career skill, the other is a life skill, and at 27 I’ve got to stop caring that I might come across as a douche. You’d think I’d have realized that through doing things like my podcast, heck my writing, but somehow when it comes to a social situation, unless someone else gets the ball rolling or I somehow summon up the will to overcome myself, I’m a waste of space. And as much as I’ve had a great time today, I’m left hating myself a bit for being so shy today.

This is very whiny, and I think I’ll just keep this to myself in terms of sending this out to the interwebs en masse. I try to publish all the stuff I write on Twitter. But with this one… well,  people can find it if they want or not. But this feels like something that was really for me. Besides, it’s self-asborbed arse and frankly the only thing that could make it worse was somehow staining this web-guff with my virtual tears. Ugh. Back to sleep, I think.