From the tone of the posts, it's pretty obvious that I was racked with guilt about the mistakes I had made. On top of this, I returned to California after what happened to find my network of friends had essentially collapsed. Not too many people read this blog, but I did have a few old friends who read these posts and who reached out to offer their support to me. They reassured me that, while I had done something bad, they didn't feel I was a bad person. I'm grateful to them.

I'd like to close the loop on that whole thing here. Why beat a dead horse? Am I really still ruminating about this almost two months later? Well, yes and no. To be clear, I'm not still dwelling on this because of the rejection or the potential missed opportunity for romance; I got past that almost immediately. What matters more to me is how the events affected me in the larger context of my personal life at the time, and the fallout that trailed along after them. I have been reflecting carefully on the experience in order to distill what it might mean I need to change about myself. Working through the guilt of my mistake has been strangely transformative; and indeed, this is worth expounding on.

I wrote the original blog post for a few reasons: first, I sent the link to the post to the girl in question, in the hopes of allaying any fears she might have had about me. When a man scares a woman on the Internet, well, I have no idea how you rectify that situation, outside of backing off. The way I saw it, this kind of fear is based on an imbalance of power. I figured that making a public disclosure of my side of the events, and admitting my part in it, was one small way to shift the balance of power back into her court. (Whether this worked or accomplished what I hoped it would, I have no way of knowing, but I didn't see how it could possibly hurt.)

Second, I genuinely wanted to communicate the errors I had made in a blog post that could be read and consumed by others, so that perhaps other people would read it and operate with a little more foresight in a similar situation than I did. This is the reason I'm writing this blog post now. I sincerely hope that someone takes my mistakes and avoids repeating them. To this end, the original post also implied some points that are worth making explicit here.

Lastly, writing not only helps me crystallize ideas that are fuzzy into concrete language, it also helps exorcise these things from my brain. If there's anything to be learned from all this, that's groovy, but I'm also ready to put this behind me.

I wrote the two blog entires linked above in the first paragraph in the throes of intense guilt, largely out of desperation to try and make sense of the events. Writing was my only possible outlet at the time. I admit they're not well-written, since my thoughts were reeling and clouded under all the stress. So, given the smattering of scattered thoughts in those blog entries, a person reading them might ask: what the hell actually happened?

In cases like this, where I've done something wrong, I'm extremely wary of cognitive biases distorting my memory of events in my favor. I worry about omitting crucial details so I seem like less of a bad guy. I worry that I'm changing details to make myself feel better. Truly, I've combed through what happened very carefully, and this represents my own motives and what happened, with as little deceit as I can manage. It might read as justification for what I did; if it comes across that way, I don't intend it to, because I sincerely wish I could take all this back. All I can do is offer what I hope is an honest accounting of the events.

My ex-girlfriend and I were together for 12 years, until last September. As sometimes happens, this ended, and I spent the next several months among friends, licking my own wounds and trying to imagine venturing back out into the world with any shred of confidence. This was incredibly hard to imagine doing in the early months; it was my first real significant breakup, ever.

In January, I happened to notice a picture of a girl from my past in my Facebook news feed. I hadn't seen her in over a decade. This sparked an initial romantic interest on my part. For about a week, I was unable to let the thought go, so I started to think about how to proceed.

In 9th grade, I remember developing a crush on a girl that lasted for months and, being 14 years old, I was terrified to approach her. When I finally did, she rejected me. I learned from this that we're not meant to sit on these kinds of things, holding them solely in our heads. If you have a romantic interest in someone, it makes the most sense to let the other person know, as soon as possible, and put the ball into their court. Rejection happens; you just move forward when it does.

So, while the initial spark happened in an online social network, I'm old-fashioned. There's no way I'm going to try and strike up a romantic relationship with a girl via some online chat program or by phone. There's no way for two people to read each other's signals and truly determine if there's chemistry without some kind of face-to-face meeting. It made sense to me that if anything was going to happen in this situation, it should happen in person.

At the time, nothing in my life was fixed for the long-term. I was interested in getting out of my current living situation, leaving the city when I was living, and leaving my current job. I was long overdue for moving on from the life I had shared with my ex, and in taking some initial steps to figure out what my life's work should be. On top of this, I hadn't spent any time with my parents since I gotten out of this past relationship, and both of them were slated to have minor surgeries surrounding the weekend of Valentine's Day.

So, the timing of all this seemed to indicate that perhaps I should go back to Michigan to get closure on this romantic interest of mine. Maybe it wasn't crazy to go and figure out this situation, then determine how I should move forward in my life. But still: flying all the way across the country for the slim possibility of a relationship with a girl who doesn't even know me? Who I don't know? A girl who might not even want a relationship? Could that possibly be a good idea?

I gave the idea a lot of thought, and to be perfectly honest, it seemed ridiculous to me. This isn't normal behavior. I considered that I hadn't been on a "first date" in over a decade, which made the notion of investing so much time and energy into this one particular prospect even more ridiculous. I never have been smooth with women, so without fail, I was bound to be rusty, bound to make some silly mistake. But on the other hand, I've spend most of my adult life in timidity; perhaps audacity was meant to have its day for a change.

I meditated on this decision in one of my many hikes up into the foothills of Santa Barbara late one evening. I spent a lot of time considering this, and in the end, I concluded that it was important for me to at least explore the possibility. If I embarked on the journey, I was to go "to be judged". There would be important information revealed to me about myself in the process of this journey unfolding. I had no idea what to make of this odd concept that struck my brain, but I had little reason to ignore it. More practically, given my situation, I didn't think I had anything to lose. Toujours l'audace.

So I reached out to this girl on Facebook and asked her if she'd be interested in meeting with me if I were to come to Michigan. She responded that she would be game, and I asked her if she'd be free to meet "the second weekend in February"...the Sunday of which was the 14th. She replied that she would, which delighted me. 

I later learned that my subtle hint about the holiday on that particular weekend was, alas, a little too subtle. Mid-last year, I had a fortune cookie tell me: "Be direct; one can usually accomplish more that way." I saved that slip of paper, since I felt it was a lesson I needed to learn. I wish I had listened to that cookie.

I described myself as a "cyberstalker" in the original blog post; in fairness, this is a little too strong of a term for what I actually did. It was a word I found when Googling around the night after she told me never to contact her again, when I was genuinely scared that I had done something truly evil. I was trying to figure out what I had done wrong, to figure out if I had done anything wrong, and I found the term "cyberstalker" in an e-card. I knew that men often harass women on the Internet, but I didn't perceive any of my actions leading up to our meeting as having been that egregious. But I didn't want to let myself off the hook right away.

When she agreed to a tentative meeting, here's what I did: I did some cursory scanning of her Facebook news feed (where we were friends), listened to some music on her playlists on Spotify (also friends, I think), browsed some of her retweets on Twitter (not following her), and browsed some of the books she was reading on Goodreads (where we were connected). I'm always looking for new book suggestions, and hers were unique, so I latched on to a few of them. We had a lot of overlapping interests in reading material anyway, so this wasn't too much of a stretch. 

Again, I'm used to doing this kind of background research before you meet a potential business colleague for lunch. You're looking to establish common ground early in the conversation. If you're going to go meet a girl for the first time in the hopes of striking up a relationship with her, I'd recommend you don't do this.

In hindsight, going all the way across with country with this as my primary objective wasn't fair to either of us. It put undue pressure on her, to be sure, but it also put undue pressure on me. I went into our rendezvous knowing that a lack of chemistry or rejection was all but certain, but still, when the moment came to bear my soul, I think my social anxiety went into overdrive. In any normal situation, I can be an intense person anyway...but when I told her I was interested in her romantically because I thought she was pretty, I'm reasonably sure it seemed like I was gushing.

We didn't speak after that; subsequently, there was the communication breakdown that happened over text messages. I read the signals incorrectly: to my surprise, she expressed interest in having dinner, but there was hesitation. I assumed she was unsure of herself, so I tried to be cutesy-romantic and reassuring in response, only to discover that she wasn't unsure of herself...she was unsure of me. My attempts to fan the flames were actually throwing gasoline onto them, in the worst possible way.

In the last thing she said to me, she mentioned that she was concerned that I had grown infatuated with an idealized conception of her, based on her online persona, and not the real her. Given the situation, that's a genuine concern, and if I'm guilty of overstepping any appropriate social boundaries, it might be that. It's very possible that my life had grown stale and, wanting to explore possible futures, I might have seen the possibility of some kind of future with her. Perhaps when I asked her for a date, I was asking that ideal version of her from my head, and not the actual her in reality, with whom I had just taken coffee for a couple hours.

The first thing I did after returning to California in the wake of this whole experience was to quit my job. Many of my friends have asked if I'm planning to be a programmer again. I honestly haven't decided that yet. Not only do I doubt that I can contribute to the world the way I want to as a programmer, but I'm seriously wondering if I carried out this idiotic plan because I've spent the last decade of my life staring at a computer screen. Human beings aren't wired to do this; we're wired for empathy and for human connection, not to pound instructions and messages to online friends into little machines all day. Maybe this lifestyle was a contributing factor.

As I mentioned, my original blog post was meant to shift the power dynamic of the situation, as a means of atonement. I have a couple of regrets about it: first, if you read it a certain way, and not the way I intended, it makes me out to be the victim in the situation. I was not the victim; it just seemed more important to be honest about my sense of guilt and vulnerability at the time than to save face. In that emotional state, I'm not sure I could have saved face.

Second, it did a terrible job in the way of offering an apology. (I doubt she'll ever read this...but I'm not writing this for her.) Apologies are a difficult thing to get right, and most of us so rarely practice them in writing. So, here goes: I understand that when we met, I wasn't straightforward with you about the purpose of our meeting; I did nothing to establish trust before asking you to trust me. I understand that my behavior caused you fear; I don't feel that I can fully understand this fear, but I'm trying to appreciate it. I understand that I didn't treat you as the person you actually were, and instead treated you as a person that I thought you might be. This is insulting; this has been done to me in the past, and it's diminutive. If the situation had happened in reverse, I probably would have reacted to you just as you did to me. The way things played out was not my intent, and I'm sorry.

I hate to draw anything good from what happened...but I've also been powerless to do anything else. For my part, when I make a mistake of this magnitude, I catastrophize. In the days immediately after all of this happened, I felt ashamed of what I had done. Like my brain is so good at doing, every single mistake I had ever made in every relationship I had ever had was paraded in front of me in my mind's eye. This is common: as the brain seeks to shame you for some mistake, it dredges up from memory, in ugly detail, every similar example in order to reinforce the shame.

Perhaps on some level, I knew this whole thing was a bad idea from the start, and this is why my brain manufactured the "to be judged" rationalization for the purpose of my journey: so that if things went wrong, I'd have some way of making sense of the whole experience. I can't say if this the case, but in either event, in the days immediately after this all took place, this is precisely what happened. As all my past mistakes emerged from my memory and stared me in the face, one by one, I was overcome with guilt for each of them, but I was also seeing them all plainly for the first time. I was seeing clearly my own personal history, warts and all. Unexpectedly, this afforded me clarity. 

As this became clear, the cloak of self-deception I had wrapped myself in fell away. It made me feel wonderfully human. A human being can make mistakes, learn from them, and move forward. Here's what I learned: I no longer feel the need to run from the demons of my past in the fear that they'll hold me captive; I embrace them because it's the only way to really set yourself free of their grasp. The way out is through.

I'll make more mistakes in the future, I'm sure. I put a call to action for my readers at the end of my original blog post, along with expressing my own intention to do something to try and make this right; I truly believe that if you make a mistake like this, you've upset the karmic balance in the universe. To the extent that you can, do something to shift the karmic balance back in the right direction. (And even if you're not aware of any particular mistake you've made, it doesn't hurt to assume you have and send the world some karmic love anyhow.)

For the time being, I've signed off of Facebook, and it's unlikely that I'll return anytime soon. Life is too exciting and beautiful without that kind of nonsense distracting us from it. It mires us in our pasts; the whole damned thing is a green light, in the Gatsby sense of the phrase. I really can't see myself ever pursuing a romantic interest that originated anywhere on the Internet ever again; I'm a little disappointed that I've re-emerged into the dating world in an era where something like Tinder is actually a common thing that people use...but ob-la-di, ob-la-da. In any case, I've decided not to pursue any more romantic interests for the time being, offline or otherwise...at least until I can figure out how to navigate this new world I've been out of for so long.

In response to all this, a wise friend told me that I should just let life wash over me for a while, instead of rushing out to surf its waves; to let things come to me, instead of scrambling to find them. This feels like good advice. My eyes, head, and heart remain open. Come what may.