OK, how the hell do comments break on a weblog? Seriously? Thanks for the e-mails — I didn’t realize anybody was reading this crap.
I tried changing the template to see if it would be restored, but nothin’. If there are any guardian angels out there who can take a shot at it (and no, I haven’t upgraded to WordPress 2.0), then I’ll be your friend for life. Unless you don’t want me as a friend. So then I will stalk you instead. 😉
Anyway, I was thinking more about the idiosyncrasies post, and I have yet another to submit, as weirdness is a way of life.
What happens is that I feel stress and anxiety from every angle right now, and that’s OK — it’s the story of my life. But how I react to it is very diametric, depending on the situation and who’s around. Several of you who know me know that I can shut down and not breathe a word — I can smile like nothing’s wrong and I can make you believe I’m suzy goddamned sunshine. But then there are other days that I just want to stomp and shout and go assault a dartboard with mental pictures planted squarely in the bullseye.
It’s weird, really. If you tell me a secret, I will keep it till the day I die. But there’s something inherently wonky in my wiring that prohibits me from truly squelching what’s bothering me. I mean, I try to swear and rant and snark and just plain bleed the wound so that the poison is no longer in my body. And sometimes, it really works.
But more often than not, all I want is just one single solitary person to whom I can rant absolutely uncensored. I don’t want to worry that it will be held against me at a later date and time. I don’t want anyone to think me difficult and unpleasant and, well, NOT easygoing. Because I try to be, but it’s those things that I really AM squelching that start to rear their ugly heads in other ways that impact my demeanor and my choice of words and my inability to fully reign in my emotions and maybe even actions.
The comedian Chris Rock had a great take on that insofar as dating — he said that you (as “you”) can’t show up to a date — you send your representative, ’cause no one would ever want you as you are. The older I get, the more experiences I’ve had in which people prefer the quiet, smiling, agreeable version of myself that really doesn’t exist. The passionate, opinionated, restless one always bubbles to the surface eventually, but going back to my earlier point, it’s likely because I don’t really tell anybody the full story about anything.
We have a saying in my line of work that perception is greater than reality. Applied to humans, I guess we distort our own realities so much that we don’t even remember sometimes who we started out trying to be. And for me, a victorious day is one that ends with generating the hype but not always believing it. A truly wonderful day, however, ends with someone else understanding exactly why you feel the way you felt — and loving you anyway.