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The board · Toronto · Curious

I have read this board twice through and never written a word until now

Posted as first_thing_written, 31 August 2026

Looking for
questions answered by somebody who has been doing this a long time
Experience
None whatsoever, and I have never told anybody any of it.
Around
the west end, Toronto

I have read every post on this board twice and never written one. This is the first thing I have written anywhere about any of it. It took three evenings, which tells you roughly where I am starting from.

Twenty three, west end, second year of a degree, sharing a house with three other people that is cold from the middle of October.

What I know: I have wanted a particular kind of thing since I was about eighteen and I have never said it to anybody. Not a friend, not a partner, nobody at all. When I read posts here from people who are forty and saying it aloud for the first time, I recognise them completely, and it frightens me, because I can see the exact route by which a person ends up there.

So this is me not doing that. Written down, in public, by somebody who has done nothing.

What I would like first is to talk to somebody who has been at this a long time and ask a great many questions. Somewhere public, with no expectation of anything afterwards. I am not being coy: I want the conversation more than I want anything else at the moment.

Somebody my age posting here attracts a particular sort of message and I have already had a few. I am not looking for anybody whose opening is how much I have to learn.

Very little money, a lot of free afternoons.

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What to have sorted before you reply

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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