So, as I'v posted before, I'm a senior graphic design student at an art school and I have to do a final degree project. My project is about sharing life-changing experiences within the context of other experiences in your life to help form an idea of your perspective. The ultimate goal here is that by sharing these experiences, hopefully we can help people relate better to one another and understand that we are all humans. Coming out was a big, life-changing experience that I went through and all of you went through or are going through now, and it was my inspiration for this project. I am wondering if anyone here would be willing to share life-changing experiences with me so I can start testing my ideas about how everything will work with this project. I'll explain the details (as they are right now, this is still a work in progress so I'm definitely open to change): I will be creating a website where you can post your life-changing experiences, including a location of where it happened, and a slider where you can indicate at what stage of life this happened to you in. You will be able to post written entries, video, and audio entries. You may choose to post an experience anonymously or attached to your account on the site. When you post an experience it shows up on a timeline according to where you put it on the slider. As you post more and more experiences you will be able to view the experiences of your life in chronological order. Other users will also be able to see your timeline, but will not see experiences posted anonymously on your timeline. This will allow others to take a look at the experiences you feel help define who you are. By being able to read/view/hear these experiences, other users will be able to understand more about your life and why you do the things you do. Other users will be able to state if they have shared a similar experience and post their own experience of that situation as well. This is how users will become connected to one another. You aren't "friends" but you've experienced similar things so you are linked in that way. (this i'm still working on, i definitely need feedback on it) If a user reads all of your posts (witha minimum of a certain number of posts to ensure they have an understanding of what you have experienced) they will be rewarded with a picture of you (or maybe just some information about you). This provides a reward for reading all of someone's posts to entice people to really make an effort to understand you. Also, if someone reads your experiences and finds that they have had a lot of similar experiences, when your picture is revealed it will help them realize that your experiences define you more than the way you look and that you are just another human who deserves to be treated equally. There will be a weekly theme (for instance, Divorce, Marriage, coming out, etc.) and each day there will be a question or situation posed that you may reply to. The results of the daily question or situation are posted the next day, so you can't read other people's posts about it when you answer. You reply to the question or situation using only your perspective at the time that you read it. You would be encouraged to post an experience you have had. As an additional piece of interesting data that could be pulled from this site has to do with location of experiences. By adding the location of the experience, we can gather all similar experiences and view them on a map. So if a number of people in one part of the world is experiencing similar things, we can look into that. So, for instance, if we look up bullying experiences, we can see where people are being bullied in comparison to other locations. So we might see a map that indicates that more people are reporting experiences of bullying in say Oklahoma than in Massachusetts. From this we might conclude that there's something we can do to solve that problem. (this really does less for the individual user, but would be useful to voters and people making laws) It sort of brings to light what life is like for people in different areas of the world and tries to validate those lives by saying other people have experienced similar things, even if they are in a different location or from a different culture. Any feedback on this would be GREAT! If you need me to explain anything more in detail, I can. If you want to share an experience with me to include in my testing of this project, feel free to PM me or post it here! You guys are the kind of people I'm making this for. We deserve to be understood by others. The coming out process shouldn't be something only we have to think about.
Good luck with your project! I wish I could help you but I'm still way into the closet. In fact I still haven't made up my mind about coming out to anyone. As for life changing experiences, I have only had one life changing experience in relationship with my studies and career path, but it had nothing to do with my sexuality. Maybe the only determining experience in terms of my sexuality was hanging around EC instead of hanging around NARTH when I finally accepted there was a BIG probability that I was gay. Although if I wasn't too atheist I would have probably gone the other way and I would still be looking for gay cures.
These don't just have to be life-changing experiences about coming out or sexuality. I want to know about your first day of school, or your first sleepover. These things might not be life-changing per se but they might be influential to who you are. There's no need to share who you are on the site any more than you would here. As a user of the site, you only share with us your email and your desired username and password. We dont link your facebook or require pictures of you. However you can give people that bonus information for reading all of your stories. So you can share stories about being in the closet and how you felt at those times and how you deal with those feelings. Essentially this site wil build into a kindof "guide" for life. You will be able to see what happened to other people and how they dealt with it.
