Be real and true

or rather, I still can’t articulate what I mean by this, so for now, I give up. (Except that I accidentally completed the goal instead of giving up… oops!)

I think I might be grumpy! I don’t know where it came from, because nothing bad or even unusually annoying has happened this morning. Yet I am SO pissy… I’ve been at work for just over an hour, and I’ve already cut my boss off in mid-sentence, opting to walk out of his office before he stammered out the last of his mind-numbingly unnecessary sentence; AND I’ve yelled at one of the assessors who has such a chronic problem with verbal diarrhea, not to mention his VERY LOUD, BOOMING VOICE, that I can’t get a word in edge-wise if I don’t get right in his face. I also had to endure a phone call with a woman who is the personified antithesis of word economy – at least with her I was able to just hold the phone away from my ear, roll my eyes repeatedly and let out several sighs of exasperation.

So… I think I can expect a crappy day. And yet… now that I’m alone in my office, door closed, everybody quaking and cowering in their respective corners while I indulge in my first of many daily 43T check-ins, I feel fine!! I’m not grumpy, heck, I’m not even irritable!! I’m thirsty. That’s about it.

Hm. Maybe my headband is too tight this morning.

Regardless, I’m glad for two things – one, that I’m not going to try to figure this out. It’s enough that I’ve recognized and accepted that I’m feeling this way; and two, that I caught myself before I got too far into the usual “I’m such a terrible person for getting annoyed and for showing it” routine.

There’s still part of me feeling tremendously guilty for being a bitch, but another part of me is proud, in a way, for having been really and truly responsive to the annoyances I encountered with each of these folks. Dammit, I may be a bitch, but I’m just as entitled to be a bitch as they are to be irritating personalities, right? (you don’t have to answer that :o)

That said, I don’t want to be a bitch, and I don’t want to hurt people who are, like me, just going about their merry ways being their own precious imperfect selves. But I think it’s a good sign that “the real me”, regardless of how ugly, can still find her way to the surface and be real.

I guess if I have to be a bitch sometimes, I’m glad I’m a REAL bitch! :oP

In considering why it is I’m drawn to some friends, and sort of not so much to others, I got thinking about how I make friends in the first place and why I maintain the friendships at all. I think very often I start out drawn to people I understand – those that are like me in some way, and it’s usually some flaw that we share – figuring that if I forgive them for that icky trait, they’ll forgive me in return for it. The problem with that selection method is that there seems little to learn from people stuck the same way as me, and I quickly get bored with them. I’m thinking I might be better off befriending people whom I regard on a much higher plane, and then follow their fine examples! Just a thought.

Oh boy – something’s afoot.

Yesterday I spent over an hour writing an e-mail to a new friend. Why such a long time? Because somewhere near the last paragraph, I couldn’t figure out just what I wanted to say! I started that same paragraph about 15 times (conservative estimate), would look it over, think it through to its end, and would then delete the whole thing. Over and over and over again.

It isn’t that I don’t know how I’m feeling, it’s that A) I’m not sure how much or when I should put it out there, if at all; and B) my feelings don’t all stream in the same direction (sort of like “this feels great, God I feel guilty… this must be bad” kinda thing). So it’s tough to describe what’s real and true for me when it seems almost to contradict itself.

As chance had it, I had an appt last evening with my sweet, wonderful, indispensable therapist. In the course of an entirely unrelated conversation, she complimented me TWICE on how I’ve learned over time (in the context of my rel’p with M) to be truer to myself… can you believe that? Here’s me, just hours earlier, feeling like I can’t articulate what’s real and true, and then she just pulls that word outta nowhere! _{maybe she’s reading my 43T???? hehe}

When I think of it, though, she is correct. I have become increasingly truer to myself over these last couple of years. And perhaps that’s the order of things – maybe I must first be real and true with myself, and get good at it, before I can be real and true outside myself.

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’??