GirlRobot's Pod - by Droniela

This is a post about loneliness, but not in my usual whiny way on the subject.

I mean, it might get a bit whiny, but not in the same way as usual.

I am a lonely person.

But not because people don't like my company, I discovered. They do.

I have many friends IRL, my roomie, my girlfriend, my flirts. I am not here to complain, but to explore the loneliness I speak of.

It's hard for me to share my activities with someone. It always feels like it's more trouble than it's worth.

Like, I usually complain that when I do my photoshoots I have to do everything alone, which is true, it's a lot for a single person.

But at the same time I *dread* the idea of trusting my art in the hands of another person.

I've done content with other people before and unless I direct them on every step, I'm always disappointed on the outcome.

For instance, once I gave my camera to a third person so me and the second person could play without worrying about that. I took care of the lights, the effects and really managed to relax and enjoy the shoot instead of worrying about directing.

But then I got the raw footage and the entire thing was 1/3 off-center because that stupid fucking asshole, instead of point the lens to us, pointed the flip screen.

God, I was angry editting that shit.

The same goes for my other hobbies, I can't see myself working with another person on fixing stuff.

Even at work, it's not automatic for me to seek teamwork because during 80% of my career, I was the only person doing what I do on whatever team I was.

I wonder where that comes from.

Of course my usual suspect was the terrible, weird way I was raised, which even my siblings agree that was "You weren't raised, you were just there".

But even though I am pretty sure that after careful inspection I will come to the conclusion that yes, my environment is to blame, I also think that jumping straight to that conclusion is lazy and will probably not reveal the whole truth.

I think it was a set of unfortunate coincidences.

Yes, I mostly played alone (for reasons that would turn this into me whining) and did school assignments alone, and I raised myself alone because everyone was too busy to raise me.

But what after that? Where were the opportunities for me to learn teamwork?

I remember enjoying some teamwork opportunities in online gaming, for instance.

I had this group of friends where we would play anything online with no purpose of winning, just for a laugh.

Ragnarok Online, World of Warcraft, Gunbound, Diablo 2. We had so much fun.

But then life circunstances changed and I've never played online with friends again. That was a good 15 years ago.

As far as work goes, I was either in a big team working projects so small it made no sense to work together with someone, or teams so small there was no one to colaborate with. Mostly I was instructing people from other teams (artists and designers) on how to make stuff for my work.

And then I was the only front-end dev in a team full of back-end devs.

...from 2014 to 2023.

In my current job I'm getting to stretch my teamwork muscles a little bit more and while uncomfortable to seek, I usually enjoy the results of it.

I wonder if there is space in my life, my hobbies and my projects for other people.

If me being a control freak will scare away everyone willing to help.

Only time will tell. But it's my responsability to grow out of it, regardless of the past.