My fatal flaw is that I have no filter. Acquaintances I barely know, people I have only met in passing, will light up when I run into them in the mall – “Oh, I love your tweets! Your blog entries! Your status updates,” they’ll say. “You’re hilarious! You’re crazy!”

I guess this is the offshoot of me being such a socially-inept, awkward nerd. I’m an affirmation whore, with an incredible need to be accepted, and the simplest, fastest way I think I can get people to like me is by making them laugh with crude crassness.

Hence the torrents of outrageous oversharing that used to populate my Twitter and Facebook accounts – what kind of underwear I’m wearing for the day, how I like to multi-task by shaving my head and smoking while taking a dump, the new sex tape scandal I’ve downloaded, etc. Things designed to fall askew of conventional social decorum, and provoke a reaction from the reader.

Well, somebody call John Mayer, cos I think I’m the latest, greatest incarnation of the legendary Captain Backfire..

Above all things, I value openness, honesty, and sincerity. I can’t filter myself, because I’m such an emotional person – a classic INFP, by Myers-Briggs standards. I navigate the world by how I feel, by intuition, by how I perceive things. And closing myself off emotionally would mean I couldn’t connect to the world in that way.

And I suppose I’m leaving myself open to getting hurt when I do that. That’s the sort of thing that happens when you lay yourself out so honestly and openly to people – especially the ones you choose to love. You’re always just a little bit more vulnerable to getting your heart broken in those cases, mainly because it isn’t really inside your chest anymore – it’s in their hands, unprotected, and theirs to either cradle or crush.

But you know what?

I would choose to feel that pain one million times, over even trying to live a life without love.

There are some things that are worth being hurt for.