What I Think
There are some days I want to shed myself like a snake sheds its skin, and emerge new and fresh. A birthday’s that kind of opportunity: the start of a personal New Year, the beginning of another trip around the sun, a way to look back at what’s not working and change the trajectory of where I’m headed.
It came to my attention, slightly before my 51st birthday, that I am a “nice person”, and to date, it has gotten me nowhere. I’m so full of pent-up rage, seething silence and ass-chewing guilt that, when I picked up the book Not Nice: Stop People Please Staying Silent, & Feeling Guilty…And Start Speaking Up, Saying No, Asking Boldly, And Unapologetically Being Yourself, I immediately grabbed a ballpoint pen and crossed out the Oxford commas on the cover. And for that matter, I scratched out the uppercase A’s in the title and made them lowercase, because it made me feel good.
When I turned 40, I heard a lot of “Oh, this is the age when you stop caring what people think about you.” It ticks me off that I am 51 and still pull my punches when it comes to saying what I think, speaking up and taking crap — at work and in my relationships — and I still care what people think. Why, just in the last week, I:
Held my tongue when a good friend told me about — and made excuses for — an extremely poor and ungodly decision,
Got guilted into capitulating in my boundaries because I assumed I was in the wrong,
Kept the conversation superficial when asked about my thoughts,
Apologized when I and other person reached for the door handle at the same time,
Went into the market and tried not to take up space in the universe because I didn’t want to bother anybody with my shopping cart, and
Let a co-worker continue to do something that was unprofessional because I was afraid I would damage our working relationship and my professional credibility.
Sometimes not speaking up is astute, such as refusing to engage when confronted with a stupid political or religious opinion on social media. (My scrolling finger muscles are twice as large as my other ones just with this practice alone.)
Other times, it’s evidence of fear. It’s monitoring myself to the point where I must come across in a pleasing manner to others, apologizing profusely for someone’s own reaction to me (which they own, by the way), making sure they like me and don’t have any negative feelings or discomfort in a situation. This is nonsense. and doesn’t reflect the fact that human relationships should be based on being real with each other. As New York Times columnist Tim Kreider once wrote: “If we want the rewards of being loved, we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”
Mortifying, indeed. Why, if my friend really knew what I thought of their near life-ruining decision, or if I held my ground when it was just a matter of a personal line of demarcation rather than a hero/villain situation, or if those shoppers were irritated with me and my cart in their way, or I blogged about what’s really going on in ol’ Shazzy’s life…or…or a million other things I fear, I wouldn’t be loved.
That’s the thing about creating whatever art comes out of your soul. You bleed into your craft and deposit a bit of yourself in whatever you create, but as author Jon Acuff says, “Art is the Olympics of vulnerability.”
So this is a vulnerable post, I suppose. But going into this new year, I want to be energized about my upcoming year, not worried about what might happen or dreading uncomfortable situations. I want to speak up, have meaningful conversations and be the kind of person who says what needs to be said. I want to be comfortable being unapologetically myself. And if people don’t like me, fuck ‘em.
OK, that wasn’t nice. But I guess the handcuffs are off.
