The movies Beyond The Law and Edge of Tomorrow have this in common: They are both about a main character who starts out wholly unqualified for the task in question and forges himself into someone qualified. That's kind of the story behind my relationship to a certain male-dominated space.
When I discovered it, I saw it as an opportunity to be a small fish in a big pond for once. On various online forums, I had repeatedly felt like a big fish in a small pond over the years and I found it really suffocating and frustrating and burdensome.
I was like "This is so awesome! I can just feed my mind! No one will care AT ALL what I say and do because I'm a big fat nobody and there are all these people with PhDs and what not."
So I proceeded to feed my mind. And then I began running into substantial friction and pushback that baffled me.
I was getting a lot of "soft" data that suggested that people saw me as prominent for a woman in this space and I was like "Nooooo. That can't be right. Surely, there are women here with more real world career accomplishments than I have and I just don't know who they are."
So I began privately collecting data. And what I found was that for a woman, yeah, I had a shockingly high ranking even though it was still "big fat loser NOBODY" territory for the forum as a whole.
So it turned out that I was making waves completely unintentionally. After that, I began trying to sort my relationship to the site and figure out how to behave better since I had accidentally become "somebody" to some small degree while just trying to get my intellectual needs met and operating on the assumption that NO ONE would ever notice me or care about ANYTHING I did there.
So I began working on it instead of treating it like a playground. And I was okay with that in part because I find social dynamics interesting, so figuring out what was going on with my relationship to this forum and how to navigate it became kind of my new play thing while I tried to figure out how to be more serious and stop freaking out my human safety cage.
I was like "This is so awesome! I can just feed my mind! No one will care AT ALL what I say and do because I'm a big fat nobody and there are all these people with PhDs and what not."
So I proceeded to feed my mind. And then I began running into substantial friction and pushback that baffled me.
I was getting a lot of "soft" data that suggested that people saw me as prominent for a woman in this space and I was like "Nooooo. That can't be right. Surely, there are women here with more real world career accomplishments than I have and I just don't know who they are."
So I began privately collecting data. And what I found was that for a woman, yeah, I had a shockingly high ranking even though it was still "big fat loser NOBODY" territory for the forum as a whole.
So it turned out that I was making waves completely unintentionally. After that, I began trying to sort my relationship to the site and figure out how to behave better since I had accidentally become "somebody" to some small degree while just trying to get my intellectual needs met and operating on the assumption that NO ONE would ever notice me or care about ANYTHING I did there.
So I began working on it instead of treating it like a playground. And I was okay with that in part because I find social dynamics interesting, so figuring out what was going on with my relationship to this forum and how to navigate it became kind of my new play thing while I tried to figure out how to be more serious and stop freaking out my human safety cage.