I Know, I Know, I Know

A little introspection for a big new year.

January usually happens to be a month of self-evaluation for me, so here’s a bit of discussion on a couple things that may or may not be interesting.

I know I can be too trusting. Part of me thinks I was hard-wired to be this way. Anyone who knows me can tell you that I have, probably, the worst sense of direction you’ve ever heard of. This goes for everything. It’s part of why I put off learning to drive for so long. I get lost in buildings I’ve never been in, I can’t give directions, I can’t read road maps. Nothing. When it comes to those kinds of things, I’m able to have perfect, beautiful faith in whoever is leading. I’m able to have faith in others in different things, too, but it’s generally not as strong. Thinking on this, I wonder if maybe I do this in order to shirk responsibility. I mean, if I just trust the leader and something goes wrong, no one can blame me and I likely won’t blame myself (unless I foresaw the problem and didn’t say anything). That’s probably a bad thing. I fear responsibility because I fear the conflict that can sometimes arise from it.

I know I avoid conflict at almost any cost. But we’ve been over this one, haven’t we. I think that, perhaps unconsciously, I have surrounded myself with people of similar temperament since I was a child. The last time I had a relatively heated fight with my friends, I was in grade six. The closest thing since then would be when this girl Janice was mad at me for telling Kim something she said about her in grade ten. I wasn’t under the impression it was said in confidence, considering she was babbling openly to a huge group of us at our lunch spot and it only seemed like the ‘loyal best friend’ thing to do, to tell her. Beyond that, there was some friction between my friends and another group of girls on the Greece trip, but I made a point of distancing myself a bit from that one, for everyone’s good. Some of them were friends with one of my friends… plus, they were vicious. It could have gotten out of hand. It could have gotten uglier than it was. I’m just glad I don’t see any of them anymore. I get the feeling that they probably said a whole lot of awful things about me, about us, but that is only based upon that we said some pretty mean things about them too.

I know that other people suffer when I’m insecure about myself. (See three entries ago.) It seems like no matter now much I know it or how much I remind myself, I can’t try hard enough to fix it completely. That’s the main thing that makes me see that I’m still selfish. Even so, maybe it’s getting better slowly. Every so often I’ll learn something new and that helps me to keep moving forward with things. High school was quite good for that. Early on, whenever I’d walk down the halls and see a group of pretty girls giggling subversively, I’d automatically think they were laughing at me and I’d feel bad. Then I had a blinding epiphany one day on my way from math class in grade twelve when I realized that in order to have thought that every person laughing at anything had to have been mocking me, I also must have thought that every person not only noticed me, but found me important enough, more important than anything else happening to them at the time, to laugh about with their friends. And that is just absurd. Girls are catty and self-centered in their own right, I doubt most (any?) of them gave me any thought as I passed them by silently in the river of students flowing toward staircase F.

I know I resist change until I’m just forced to accept it. I didn’t always know this, or at least, it didn’t consciously register. But keeping it in mind helps me not to resist. Words help me not to. Words like, “It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life; in change there is power.” — Alan Cohen. For a while I carried that quote around with me… sometimes I had to read it a lot. This is somewhat unrelated, but I took yoga for a while a few years ago. Our teacher was nice, and a bit nuts at times. One thing I remember him saying that really struck me was, ‘all pain is resistance. Resistance creates pain. If you accept the things you’re resisting and learn to live with them, or learn to deal with them better, you’ll notice a dissipation.’ I’ll bet there are a lot of things in life that don’t apply there, but at the time I thought it was an interesting notion. If you know someone is leaving your life, it’s easier if you let them go and don’t hang on needlessly.

I know I get too attached too quickly. Sometimes after finally embracing change, I cling on, claws and all. (Jr. high is the best example of this. I was scared to start grade seven. So scared I almost made myself sick. By the end of grade nine, I didn’t want to leave. Ever.) I’ve noticed it with many things. Things, concepts, places, and people. Especially people. I don’t think I can really help it much though. I know I border on obsession when I really like something. However, I also know something else kind of odd about myself. When I know someone’s on their way out of my life for whatever reason, my subconscious will start cutting ties mentally even before they leave. I’ll think about them less. Does it make separation easier? Oh yes. Do I like that my subconscious chooses to do this? Not at all. I’ve known that it happens with me this way ever since I was at the tender age of nine. It was no exaggeration to say that I flat-out adored my homeroom teacher. As if the memories weren’t proof enough, my journal entries from that year will surely support that. They’re hilarious, really. Like, “I’m so lucky to have the coolest teacher who ever existed, I hope I’m just like her one day!” In April I thought I’d rather die than start grade five with a new teacher. By June I was fairly indifferent. Why? I suppose I just got used to the idea of moving on. It’s my brain’s way of protecting me from emotional distress. But sadness about someone leaving is just proof that you have had a relationship with them worth mourning now that you won’t see them much anymore. In a way, to me, feeling nothing is like being cheated. So I wish my brain would just embrace that. And you know, I guess that’s not odd, now that I think about it. I guess pretty much anyone likes having time to get used to moving on. Who was it that I was talking to at Billy and Jeanne’s wedding who was floored that girls sometimes say their name along with the last name of someone they have a crush on? In any case, yeah, girls definitely do that. Just to hear how it sounds, you know?

I know I focus on the future with blind intensity. Sometimes I don’t even notice what’s going on in the present in idle times, like sitting on the train. I always yearn for something more, something better, something that I can’t have quite yet. It’s been a goal of mine for quite some time to start living in the moment and luckily I have some friends who are very good at it. In quiet moments I realize that these years will probably wind up being some of the best of my life, so I need to start enjoying them.

I know that, somehow, I’m practical and impractical at the same time. Despite being at times rooted in unyielding sensibility, I find it easy to believe in the supernatural (perhaps because I simply want to). This is possibly one of the most enigmatic things about me. I certain things, I’m straightforward, practical, want to know facts and not speculation, seek purpose and question motives. One of many examples of this is one time when I went camping with my friends. Three of them had left earlier to get a campsite and Jen and I were going to drive down and meet them in the evening after we got off work. So, we were on time leaving my house, which was staggering because we thought we’d be late. Suddenly Jen decides that we need to stop at the Dollar Store. Why? To buy ceramic gnome figurines. Why? To throw them in the campfire. … What? Even to this day it boggles me. I’m pretty used to Jen at this point after having known her for so long but even this confused me! I couldn’t work out how she’d gotten this idea and the ‘practical side’ of me just reeled. ‘We don’t need gnomes. Why would we?’ In retrospect it was pretty fun having the gnomes (actually it turned out to be a cow, a dog, a snail, a pig and a… heron?) but I never would have thought of it myself. That becomes a point of friction every once in a while. In general I can’t fathom doing random things just for the sake of doing them and so I guess people interpret that as me trying to spoil their fun. Which I don’t. So that’s a pretty big part of me.

An equally big part is the, let’s say, ‘fantasy world’ me, who is able to believe impossible things. I know I have a run-away imagination sometimes. Like, it’s a fact that roughly 1/3 of people (myself included) sneeze when they are exposed to sunlight. When I heard that statistic a few years ago, my very first thought was, ‘that’s just evidence that vampires really did exist hundreds of years ago and they bred into the human population until their genes got so diluted that, now, all that’s left of the vampire traits is a slight sun allergy.’ Now, come on, that’s not an explanation based on truth! (In fact, upon reading things on the ‘site for real vampires’, I keep thinking they all need swift trips to a psychiatrist.) One other instance of me jumping to supernatural explanations was one morning when my mom and I woke up to find three 4-inch long, charred gashes in a chair in our living room. My first thought there was that is was demonic activity (unsettling, especially since I’d had a bout of sleep paralysis that morning). Upon further inspection, I realized (brilliantly) that during sunset the evening before, the sun must have hit the magnifying make-up mirror that was nearby and reflected a beam (like when you fry ants with a glass in the summer) that set the chair on fire. I don’t know why it stopped burning, maybe the material was flame retardant, but I suspect the ‘gash marks’ showed up due to the weave of the fabric. Anyway, I think a lot of people wouldn’t have thought, ‘uh oh, demons,’ before anything else.

I know I project my own emotions onto others. I explain to people how they must be feeling when they come to me within emotional turmoil, and I really (really, really) need to stop doing that. During a fairly long and involved conversation with Sammy’s mom (as if there’s any other kind of conversation with Sammy’s mom, ha!), I learned that this practice is very common for my personality type, which, in a way, is comforting. I could be a better listener. I used to be. Something changed. I need to change it back.

I know that my first instinct is to give up. When things get too messed up or I don’t know where I went wrong, I tend to scrap it and start over again, hoping I don’t make the same mistake. So, to anyone who’s ever helped me fix something without starting it all over again, thank you. You make me into something better.

I know this is stupid, but… in the Matrix Revolutions, my second favourite part of the movie is when Trinity hugs Neo when he says, “But I think you’re gonna have to drive…” I didn’t even mind the rest of the movie so much, you know? (A lot of people hated it.) That tiny part always hits me more than most of the other Trinity/Neo scenes because most of the other ones are all super-dramatic and people don’t say things like they do in real life. Come on.

I know I normally read too much into what people say. I search for meanings underlying where, sometimes, none exist. I know I focus on their reactions to small events and make them into symbols for how they’ll react to everything else. I shouldn’t judge people so simply like that. Surely people can handle similar situations differently based on what’s really happening. I was shopping with this guy one time and for some reason he pointed out something on a box written ‘in Korean’ which was clearly, clearly Japanese and I said so. But no, he insisted it was Korean, which I thought was odd because it was clearly, clearly Japanese (to a trained eye, the two look nothing like each other). As I sighed and tapped my nail discretely on the MADE IN JAPAN label, I thought to myself then that it would never work out with us because if someone is so rigidly unyielding when they’re wrong about something very inconsequential, they’ll be the same way when they’re wrong about something important. Even I can see that’s just an unfair conclusion to come to and I’m sorry.

That’s all I got. Maybe I’ll be able to expand on it all next year this time, huh?

(PS: I also know that my skill in Trainmastery went up a few days ago because I needed a City Centre train but a Dalhousie one came first. And then it changed into a City Centre train after a few seconds of being stopped in front of me, which meant everyone got off and I got on. It was glorious.)