It’s a more complicated question than it seems. 

If I were some kind of aggressive, domineering, imposing, or even very intense person, the question would be easy to answer. 

The answer would be HELL YES. 

In the same vein, if I was a shy, softspoken, unsure of himself mouse of a person, the question would be equally easy to answer. 

The answer would be AWWW, THAT’S SO CUTE! NO. 

But no, I am somewhere in between. I am terribly shy but also extremely confident. I have problems speaking up for myself at the doctor’s office and yet I would argue with God Himself if I thought I was wrong. I have social anxiety so bad that even doing things with my friends, whom I love and trust, takes battling my inner demons, and yet I have no problem performing in front of a crowd, a camera, or royalty. 

And that’s just the introvert/extrovert stuff. 

My feeling is that I send out a lot of mixed messages. My intellectual self-confidence says one thing, my gentle genial joking nature says another, my enormous size and maleness a third. 

And the fact that I have so much emotion going on below the surface of which I am not fully aware and therefore do not know what message I am actually putting out makes me more confusing still. 

Add in my fluid sense of identity and a tendency to shapeshift like I am the genie from Alladdin, and I am am enigma wrapped in a paradox and seasoned with fresh conundrums and Tibetan salt before being rolled in mysteries and breadcrumbs and deep fat fried. 

Because I am, after all, a deep fat friar. 

And this is not the sort of question people who know and love me can answer, because of course they have me figured out by now.  They know me as the brilliant shiny tragically fragile bizarre little hothouse flower I am, and therefore they can’t see me as others see me any more. 

And in a sense, it’s not a question I could ask strangers who just met me either, and not just that would be super creepy and weird, but because I am fairly certain they wouldn’t know either. 

My signals are just too complicated. You have to know me for a bit to get any kind of a clear idea of just what I am about. 

When you figure me out, please let me know. Because I don’t get me either. 

Now I have pondered whether there is something I could do to clean up my signal, so to speak. Not in order to lie about who I am – I can’t and won’t do that – or make any sort of compromise of self, but to simply make myself more easily understood by others. 

Because being a complex enigma shrouded in mystery might seem like it would make you all alluring and captivating, but in realy it just makes you weird, hard to deal with, and best avoided. 

But too nice to mistreat openly. I am the sort of person who is easy to like but hard to take. Most people just don’t want to work that hard in order to make literal and emotional sense of someone. 

Forget actually trying to relate to me. 

Back to the main question : do I intimidate people? 

Yes and no. Sorry, the quantum physics answer is all I got. 

Again, it’s a matter of mixed messages. I am very intellectually assertive and confident and I clearly think fast and articulate myself powerfully and effectively, and that might well intimidate people slower than me. 

And that’s most people. 

And while I have come a long way since I was an unwitting verbal and intellectual bully in my early adulthood, I am not foolish enough to think myself permanently reformed. I know that there is always the possibility of a relapse and I do my best to monitor myself. 

Power tempts, after all. 

So in the right situation, I might intimidate the hell out of people.  Especially people who lack my kind of confidence and verbal virtuosity. 

And that’s most people. 

On the other hand, in another mode, I am a sweet, funny, kind of weird dude.  As long as there’s no serious kind of argument,  my gentle giant vibes are present and I can come across as the exact opposite of intimidating. 

And then in a third mode (I have so many modes), I might come across as, well, kind of pathetic. In both a good and bad way. 

So  I guess what I am saying is that I’m a complicated man. 

And no one understands me…. at all. 

This is why it is so hard for me to answer the question of whether I intimidate people or not, or indeed, any question about how I come across to people. I really have no idea. 

And that means I have no real control over it. And that should concern me. It’s part of how one deal with the world after all. 

But I am the sort of person who works from the inside out. So fretting about the details of how I am coming across does not come naturally to me, and to be honest, I find the whole subject distasteful. 

My approach is to concentrate on being sincere, honest, good-natured, gentle, and kind, and trusting that these qualities will shine through to others and tell them what they really need to know about me. 

Perhaps that is naive of me. A lot of people are far too superficial to see through my weight and my size and my generally not exactly coming across as a grade-A alpha stud dog macho man. 

I could if I wanted to. But I don’t. 

But as far as I am concerned, for now at least, filtering out all the superficial and shallow people sounds like a great plan to me. 

I will just concentrate on maximizing personal awesomeness and let the chips fall where they may. 

After all, isn’t that what us dreamers are meant to do? 

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.