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The board · New York · Curious

I think I might be the other one, and that has taken me years

Posted as might_have_it_backwards, 4 September 2026

Looking for
an honest conversation about how you knew
Experience
Nothing of my own. A long time assuming I was one thing.
Around
Queens, New York

For most of my adult life I assumed that if this ever applied to me I would be on the receiving end. That is the version I had seen, it is what the people around me expected, and I never questioned it because I never did anything about any of it. Somewhere in the last two years I have come to think I had it exactly backwards.

Thirty seven, Queens, no experience. What changed was not a fantasy. It was noticing, repeatedly, in ordinary situations, that what I liked was being responsible for how somebody else's evening went. That is not much to build on and I know it. It is also not nothing.

What I want is to talk to people who have been through the same reversal. How did you know. How long did you sit with it. Did it feel like a discovery or like admitting something. I have found plenty written about the other direction and almost nothing about this.

I am not in a hurry and I am not looking to practise on anybody. If it turns out I was right the first time, that is a perfectly good answer.

Not looking for anyone who will tell me what I am from a paragraph. Not looking for somebody who wants to be trained by a beginner, which two people have already suggested and which strikes me as a bad idea for both of us. Not looking to meet anybody privately.

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If this one reads like your own head rather than somebody to answer, the tactics can wait. These three all happen before there is a first match to get wrong.

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