And there I am again: what it feels like to be regularly cited by strangers around the world

This is pure tooting-my-own-horn boastfulness. Naked ego trip.

Recently I noticed a Facebook discussion among strangers about a bit of massage science. (It doesn’t matter what topic — it could be any topic out of dozens.) I scanned quickly through dozens of comments thinking, “I’ve covered all this on PainScience.com. They really need to see what I’ve written about it.” But then another, embarassingly presumptuously thought: “But surely someone here has already linked to it!”

Another couple seconds of scrolling … and there it was, early in the discussion, validating my presumption and swelling my head.

And I realized that things are getting to a point in my career where it’s likely — hardly gauranteed, but definitely likely — that my articles are going to get cited whenever certain topics are brought up by almost anyone, anywhere. Weeeeird!

Strangest of all is that it feels kind of natural to me, a logical extension of something that started long ago in school: student colleagues coming to me for extra help, asking for my plain language explanation of something sciencey and head hurty.

Only now I’m doing it on a literally global scale.

Trippy.