I’m feeling my way into this goal… it’s loaded with mixed emotion for me, and I feel I have a thousand things to say about it and no ability to articulate any of it. But I’ll just start babbling and see what unfolds.

I feel myself being ingenuine disingenuous (oops! I’ve just been corrected on this!) sometimes; usually to avoid hurting someone’s feelings, or in an effort to make someone feel good/welcome/wanted/whatever. Sometimes its in an effort to be positive when I am really feeling curmudgeonly. Sometimes it’s to avoid conflict. Sometimes just because I think it’ll make me more interesting or likeable.
The thing is, regardless of the motive, I can’t decide if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s good, because I believe we all need to go beyond ourselves sometimes – both because it’s sometimes good for our outside environment and because being able to do so is good for our inside environment.

What I don’t like is the bitter after-taste it leaves. I don’t like in myself the tendency to ‘say the right thing’ or ‘do the right thing’. Especially because I usually flunk at it. And as with so many things in my life right now, I’m getting a lot of ‘universal reinforcement’ that the more I try, the less I achieve; that is, trying to be likeable or a ‘better person’ or less of this and more of that, seems to actually backfire. I seem to be able to change my behaviour effectively enough (eventually!), but I never achieve any contentment with being me.

Ideally, I’d just be myself and what I said and/or did would be ‘right’ because they would be a true reflection of who I am. I guess the real problem is, I don’t really know who I am. And the real pickle is that I’m not convinced ANY of us knows who we are; there are just different levels of comfort with that fact. I’ve known some genuinely ‘comfortable’ people, who don’t have to try; who don’t spend their time comparing themselves or their lives to the lives of others as some kind of yard-stick of self worth. I’ve also known people who never seem to enjoy a moment’s peace within themselves. I think I might be somewhere in the middle. And while I’d (of course!) love the relaxed ‘okayness’ of being 100% comfortable inside myself, I’m not even sure its attainable. Can you actually try to become less of a ‘trier’??