I do talk about my past a fair bit. I think some of that has something to do with the past five years containing experiences that have influenced me the most strongly of my whole life and which have culminated in a lot of fairly life changing conclusions. Both living on the reserve as well as in the limited social circle of the teacher village where it was not easy to travel out from, (in addition to some big changes within my family and a difficult breakup) gave me a lot of necessity and time to consider the implications of insecurity and it's impact on almost all interactions.
These conclusions started with a hypothesis that I believed was true, and then I started comparing all the situations I knew of against it to be sure that there weren't a bunch of exceptions I was missing. I asked a bunch of other people what they thought too because these were issues that were affecting the ability for me to teach effectively every day. Most people are by far the most crippled by lack of confidence, character or communication skills in every daily interaction. It's necessary to have to learn anything and also necessary for successful interpersonal interactions. I felt like I had to be sure that I could justify spending time on those ideas in class and be able to articulate the ideas clearly. I also needed to find proven ways of acquiring those three traits so that they could get on with the business of the subject matter at hand and so that whether or not music ever figured in their lives they might carry away something more useful over the long term.
Sometimes I worry that I do look only for supporting evidence for the ideas that occur to me which seem to have merit rather than more openly looking to outside sources to contribute before I make a hypothesis.
My posts are so long because I feel like if I don't get everything in now, it may be the last opportunity that I'll get to do so. Kind of like if I don't make a good enough case, the thought will be dismissed and by then I've invested enough in it that it's kind of a part of me (and by inference I feel dismissed). That's dumb I know. I used to hate it when my mum would look over my work before I had had a chance to properly check it over myself because it felt like I wasn't showing what I could do properly, or like I was being evaluated before I really was ready. I sort of feel like if I can lay it all out there then it makes more sense to respond to. Otherwise, there are all sorts of clarifying questions or "But you haven't considered this" s that I want to avoid. Maybe it's just perfectionistic tendancies. (I know I've never been good at summarizing movies or writing outlines for papers because I want to include too many details).
I realize that it tends to turn a lot of people away though who hate seeing a bunch of text. That's why I most often stick to threads where people don't mind wading through all that because they want more detail rather than less.
I also wonder sometimes if people don't see me as a little over-prescriptive or like I believe I have the answer to everything. That's not the case, but I can see how people could think so, based on what I do share. With that, it has more to do with me only taking risks with people I know wouldn't react too negatively or without enough context to understand me accurately. For example, in a PM I may regularly correspond with someone who has diametrically opposed views to my own and feel no self-consciousness about the possible conflict that could result in discussing it, because I already know that they have a basic sense of where I'm coming from and respect me. Even in a more private venue like a blog, I would be more likely to talk about those things than in general on the forum.