Falling on Your Face

There’s such a thing as being too realistic.

Being too realistic is another way of saying don’t try for the sublime, leave your dreams at the door, and settle for mediocrity.

What’s the worst that will happen if you reach too far? It’s not so dramatic as falling off a cliff, but maybe it’s still as painful as falling on your face. Isn’t that okay?

I’m not so happy sitting down. I’d rather reach. I’m happier when I’m reaching. Even if in some ways it ends up a failure, I still do amazing things on the way. The act of trying itself is a success, never mind all of the other good things that will come of it. We learn, and we can try again.

I’m not saying I want to fall on my face. I’m not going to try for failure. I’m going to reach and do everything to come out of it still standing. I am, however, okay falling on my face. I’m promising myself that I will just get up and brush myself off.

Number Numb

People forget about the concept of quality in lieu of quantity all the time. In real world practice, I see people counting and measuring with numeric metrics to measure units if life.

Lets take the 30th birthday. Why do we care? Because our system is based on units of ten. Being thirty doesn’t mean anything.

People measure the minutes of their commute. I’m sitting on the T (Boston subway) writing down thoughts for a blog post on my phone using the WordPress app. Do you care about how long or how stressful your commute is?

I’ve always thought that people can put too much faith in numbers without qualifying what those numbers might mean. I love the questions ‘what’ and ‘why’, and will always ask these more than ‘how much’ and ‘how many’.

People forget I have a blog

“So if you can’t handle keeping things private that have absolutely no business being public, then we’re going to have to talk.”

There was this one time, maybe around when I last posted on this blog, that someone got really upset at me for posting on my bookface account that they watched a particular TV show.

I know people can get really sensitive about what goes online, but why should anyone care if I out them as someone who has seen episodes of anything?

The post was only posted to my friends, not publicly or on here, and it didn’t include the @person_who_now_hates_me tag or anything. I did use a name, which I avoid on the blog, but it was just a common first name, which multiple people on my three hundred something person friends list have. But yes they considered that public.

Now. This is public. The name has been withheld, and I’m even withholding the name of the show in case the your name gets out.

I know how the paparazzi can be.

Question? Yes, you in the front. Was it porn? No, it wasn’t porn, but let’s just make something clear. Are there really any adults out there who haven’t seen porn? Okay, that’s true. The Amish may or may not have watched internet porn, but I bet they have flip-books or something.

It’s not a show I would show any shame watching. It’s a show I’ve watched before and admitted I enjoyed to real, live, human beings (not just my cat and potted plants). The only reason I found it even a bit noteworthy is that this same person made fun of me for watching the show once, which is a bit hypocritical. I didn’t say that in my bookface post, though. I’m saying it now, though. And I’m asking, what’s up with that? I don’t know this person to generally be a hypocrite.

“FYI, people at work see your facebook.”

Okay, so we have some mutual friends where you work. Trust me, I was just as likely to verbally tell them next time I saw them. Why? Because I didn’t know it was a secret. Because you teased me about it before, and now it was my turn to tease a little.

Maybe I should have known that you had really serious feelings about the stupid TV shows. Some teasing is just teasing, but a lot of teasing is bullying that happens when people are self-loathing and trying to feel better about themselves. It’s like you’re in the closet about a TV show, teasing those of us who have come out. Is your ego really so fragile? Is your self-esteem so low? I know you to be a person of confidence and even sometimes, when it counts, humility. So what is this really about?

This can’t really be about you defending your right to have people be silent when concerning your TV show prefrences? ..can it?

Well, unless they amend the constitution, is not a right. It’s also silly to think a person would consider that confidential information. It’s not even an overshare.

So, is this person going to get really silly angry when I post this? I don’t know. I really have no idea. I obviously don’t share their values about what is ‘okay to be public’ or ‘should be private’.

One more detail: this person reads my blog.

While I can block people on or add them to the ‘post this to everyone but so and so’ bookface group, I can’t do that here. And still here I post. I might even one day end up with a book. You can’t control who reads a book. Let’s Pretend This Never Happened was pretty inspiring. I think that she’s really lucky that the people in her life didn’t go all “you told people I watch this really silly TV show and that’s not okay” on her. Maybe they did. I hope they didn’t. It’s a great book.

Oh, one more detail. That person, bought her book. They should understand this while writing about life thing.

People should be able to tell their story. My story includes other people who I interact with.

So here we are with a blog that I stopped posting on for most of this year. It’s not a coincidence.

I’m not sure how I’m going to deal with this going forward, but I think step one is to not get upset myself. You know how I work through stuff? Writing about stupid stuff in my life on my blog. Yeah. What a person to do then when they become afraid to?

I can’t understand why this person cared. He was teased by a mutual friend, and that friend only did it because he knew it would bother him. This mutual friend also heard the hypocrisy. People tease you when they know it bothers you, but if you lived through kindergarten to twelfth grade, you should understand that principal. It’s trolling 101.

So I know this is ridiculous. So why did I let it get to me?

The problem is that I actually care about what this person thinks. I’ve tried talking to them about it, but we went in a circle. We tried again, another circle. It’s like talking religion or politics with people who have opposing viewpoints. At some point you should realize nothing you say is going to really change the other person’s mind.

I didn’t change my mind, but something else happened. I became, for once, a bit afraid to express myself in my desired medium. That’s not okay. I write. I share my writing online. It’s been part of my identity since I was posting poems to people on Compuserve and local BBS forums.

Look at this blog. Am I what you would call a private person?

I know there must be a way to simultaneously respect people who prefer to be private while continuing to be open myself, but I felt like I was already doing that.

I’m not going to stop writing about myself and my experiences- even if I never posted here again. The people around me are part of my experiences. There would be no stories without you! Even if I were to try and be selfish and only post about myself, I’d still have to bring in those ‘minor characters’.

What I’m trying to say is that I do not mean any disrespect, but people either going to have to live with some degree of this…

Or they have to make sure I don’t catch then watching TV…

Or they have to say “Hey, don’t go telling anyone about how I watched this on TV. It’s super personal and private and means a lot to me.”

I know it won’t be the last person who gets upset because I wrote something about them, but I was surprised about who it was and what set them off. I’m surprised at how mean and serious it got. I was just downright confused when I was contacted at work about it.

We choose the people we associate with to a large degree. I pride myself in surrounding myself with people who are both pretty amazing and who, to some degree, get and accept me.

I don’t know how we let dumb TV shows get between us.

Bridge

I’m trying to find a way to be happy that is compartmentalized, common, and oh. so. safe.

I begin to miss the days when what I did seemed challenging. I tried to run towards the next place at a break-neck pace and found myself what I thought was a transitional place.

I’m standing on a bridge that suddenly ended. I’m not at the end, but I can see it. I’m not running anymore. I feel like I should run to the end, but then what do I do there? I don’t want to stop. I guess I’m supposed to slow down, stop, and keep building it. I’m inching along, but I want to run.

I could jump at the end.

I thought someone would understand rather than telling me, “Of course it ended, it wasn’t going to go on forever.” They wave the five-year plan at me as if this wasn’t my plan when I started building. They say it as if five years starts right now instead of at the beginning of the bridge years ago. Then, were they saying five? Now they’re saying ten as if it’s nothing.

If I jump off the bridge, it’ll be cold and scary, but I can learn to swim or I’ll die trying.

I’m trying to find a way to be happy that fits in a world that I don’t understand. I’m good at the motions and I can rehearse the dance, but I’m still not a successful drone. I can’t seem to accept what others have accepted. I can’t sit still. My path forward ends.

Jump, I’ll learn to swim. I don’t need footholds, warmth, and land, or do I?

Standing and swaying on the bridge I built, all of my hard work. If it doesn’t go anywhere, does it mean anything? Many will tell you it’s the journey that matters, but a dead-end bridge is useless, pointless, and dangerous.

I could start over. I could build a new bridge: gather the materials, plan it out, and start anew. Maybe then I could map my destination in a more meaningful way. Maybe I won’t get lost this time. How many bridges have I started, and where am I even trying to go? Trying not to fall in isn’t answer enough. My head is more than above water, and I want something more.

I read somewhere recently, “Sitting in offices, doing work that has no meaning is the quickest way to become profoundly unhappy.” Is that what I’m doing? My job does have meaning, surely. Just like most jobs I’ve had, at their core I am helping people. What do you do? I help people. I help people using my skills and talents. That has meaning.

The motions repeat, and still I feel like there should be more. This section of the bridge feels so much like the last.

I lay down some more planks and inch forward. The bridge is solid. I become a better builder every bit I finish. I just wish I knew where I was going.

Identity Formation

It’s a scary world out there. In a scary world I like to have control over what I do have control over. Yes, even the illusion of control is great. I do realize most of the control we exercise over ourselves and environment is just an illusion, but I find comfort in making order on my chaos.

This is why I can sort of understand the easy solution of trying to protect your kids by trying control them and everything around them.

I’m happy that my parents had the courage to let me make a lot of my own choices when I was young. Yes, I am VERY happy for all of the mistakes they let me make too. It’s how we learn to be us.

I remember being in first grade and one day deciding I wasn’t going to wear what my mom had laid out for me to put on for school that day. From now on, I was going to choose my own clothes. I also remember figuring out why you dress in layers. One day I wore a long sleeve sweat shirt because I was cold in the morning. I had a few good hours in the afternoon to regret that decision and realize the wisdom of putting on a shirt under the sweatshirt. It’s not like I wasn’t told, but apparently I needed to learn that lesson the hard way.

That being said, there’s a lot of things out there that are not right and wrong so much as right for me, which might not be right for you. I hope if I one day become a parent that my children will share my values. We all do. I hope even more that I’ll be able to let them find those values on their own. I hope that if they disagree, I have the open mindedness to let them. I hope I won’t judge too harshly as they change their mind again and again as people do as they grow up.

Children are going to say, do, and believe some dumb things. I don’t want my kids to, but they will. I don’t want to judge them if they are different, but I’m only human and I will. I just want the courage to let them. Overall, I want them to be individuals. I want them to be self-sufficient, whole people. When I wonder how I became that way, I know it’s because I was allowed to say, do, and believe things my parents thought were dumb. And yes, as an adult, there are still some things that I day, do, and believe that I’m sure they think are dumb.

For all the ways I am different, I can say I have become a self-sufficient and whole person as much as through the guidance of my parents as through them being able to stop themselves from always intervening. Thank you for letting me fight my own battles. Thank you for letting me be me. I know it must have been scary, painful to watch at times, and even just annoying.

I can only hope that I also have that courage if I too one day become a parent. Even if a kid grows up and is a little embarrassed for doing something dumb, good for those parents who gave him the freedom to be a kid, figure things out, and be happy.