I had been following jdroth's blog "Get Rich Slowly" for about a year, and he kept referencing Ask Metafilter and how great it was. I finally gave in and became an active lurker in Summer 2009, and finally got around to registering in December 2009 explicitly to answer a question I thought I had enough expertise to answer, but ended up chickening out from actually answering. I finally had my first post in January 2010.
My first FPP, and the anxiety that led up to posting it.
I had been a member of Metafilter for over a year, and had yet to work up the courage to post an FPP. I honestly had barely worked up the courage to post to the blue - I spent almost all my time on the green, where things moved more slowly, and it seemed to me the people were nicer/ more forgiving of newbies and mistakes.
The blue was a scary place. Kind of like when you are little and your older siblings were having conversations about topics you only kind of knew about, and you were always too scared to actually pipe up and say something in the conversation, because you knew one of them would cut you down to size for saying something stupid. Probably because I intelligently decided to jump into my first conversation on the blue during a conversation about abortion. Bad choice.
Anyway, I was online, and came across a fun article that I thought might actually make a good FPP. I hemmed and hawed, checked to see if it had been posted, and it hadn't. I sat on it for a few hours. I wrote the post, previewed it, panicked, and deleted it. I did the same thing again. I finally decided "screw it" and posted it, only to realize 10 seconds later that the post had a pretty egregious grammar error. My cooler older siblings on the blue weren't going to let that one slide.
And they didn't. But it ended up making the post funnier when my knight in shining armor, HeroZero, stepped in and pretty much saved the post with this little gem.