People Are So Interesting. Part Four. Reactions to a post

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  It started with a post on THE RADICAL WRITE blog - “103 Things You Might Not Know About Me.” I read this with interest. Here was someone I know (in fact, a good friend.) I chuckled not so much at the eclectic assortments of facts as much as the personality that was being laid out before me. Here was an important version of how this person saw herself, not in the mirror but in the mind’s eyes.
  
  Later, at a writer’s group meeting, I made the mistake of complimenting the author on her candid post. She immediately invited me to post my own version of 103 things … Nonchalantly I agreed. (Mr. Cool, me.) During the drive home I mentally practiced the speech I would tell my wife – that we were changing our names and moving immediately to Outer Mongolia. Or that I had just learned that the computer was an invention of the devil, and that’s why I was burying it deep in the back yard. Or that all this blog writing was actually woman’s work, and it would be better if she just took it over and never ever never mentioned it to me again, thank you very much.
  
  She just looked at me. She does that a lot.
  
  So I wrote my version of 103 Things … You’ll find it – it’s about three or four posts before this one. And actually, it wasn’t as painful as I thought it would be. Here were things that have never made it to a resume, but in the most intimate way, largely define me. This is who I am. This is what has been important in my life.
  
  I enjoyed it so much, in fact, that I wanted others who blog to contribute their own versions. The next to (reluctantly) post was LuLu, on LUTHERAN LUCCIOLA. Next was another friend, Nicki, on NICKI LOVES DRAMA. This was followed by the Great Guru of our Writer’s group on COLLA VOCE.
  
  (At this point the author of The Radical Write commented that this thing was “spreading like an oil slick.”)
  
  Anyway … in the process of promoting this idea (and quite often laughing out loud at the clever results), I made a few unexpected observations.
  
  As writers, we all enjoy reactions to our comments. The reactions can be more appropriate if the reader begins with an understanding of the writer’s point of view. That was my justification for writing the post in the first place. What I learned was that, based on what I read, there are more similarities between writers than differences. For some reason this surprised me.
  
  The second observation was that, unlike some posts, the 103 Things … posts always received a number of reader comments, regardless of who the author was. And the comments were always in agreement.
  
  So … here’s my question. We – all of us – are readers and writers. We are all similar. We are all here, together.
  
  Why?