So you think you want to get in the ring and go a few rounds, eh?

Don’t get me wrong.

Dancing with peoples’ Public Faces is a perfectly fine thing to do.

It’s the way that society/culture is set up.

It’s been functional for many thousands of years.

One way of setting up a functioning society/culture is to have people believe that interacting with Public Faces is “what we do”.

AND

What we currently accept as true does not make it true.
Forms/rules of engagement are not real, they are agreed upon conventions.

That being said, if you show up to a Hang and expect that it’s going to be “engagement as normal”, it’s not going to work.

Your norms are probably going to be at odds with the agreed-upon-norms for Hang.

Commonly, “I’m waiting to see what the group norms are and what it is that we’re doing here, exactly.”

Common response, “Do what you fucking want. Given the players that have shown up, given your bigoted meaning-making of what these players are and how to dance with them, what do you want to do? Not what does you history tell you to do. Not what do you normally do. Not what you think you’re supposed to or not supposed to do. What do you want to do. You are here for two hours. At the end of two hours, how do you want to walk away from this feeling? Do you want to walk away thinking that this was a waste of time? Fine. Do you want to walk away all tingly and excited at the edges you danced with? Fine. Do you want to walk away feeling depressed and like a loser? Fine. The point is to try and find something that you want and to try and make it happen.”

Something like that.

Think there was a lot of practice last night about, “This is the meaning-making that my character is sending me about what is so here. I can choose to dance with that. I can also choose another POV, get another meaning-making about what is so, and dance with that. What do I choose to do? As opposed to doing as I’m told by my Primal Character.”

It’s wistfully sad that people can hear, “This is not about bringing out your Primal Character and having it prance about, showing us what it is that it can do. This is not Show and Tell about what you already have. We all know you can do that. What is it that you want to step into that your Primal Character cannot do? What can you identify as something you want to have that you currently don’t have and are willing to practice getting?” and still fall back into the rut of being a Primal Character puppet.

Same sort of experience when people take getting tagged in martial arts personally.