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Planning the menu for next week's happy hour.
I'm grateful that I have people in my life that force me to think. I really am, though my immediate reaction is to be pissed off or hurt. Still doesn't make 'em right all the time, though. So there.
I think this whole entry qualifies.
Calling all Firefly fans! This site is the best.
"There's a Lady who's sure
all that glitters is gold.
And she's buying the
stairway to heaven."
--Lez Zep, courtesy of Yahoo radio
2003 - Prayers and Plans
2002 - My sister's chaotic visit
2001 - Maintenance
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March 19, 2004
Wallowing
I sometimes feel like I'm the same old me, and yet so vastly different from "who" I used to be, as to be a completely different person. I sit here and stare and my hands, and they don't look any different from when I stared at them when I was young. They've held reigns, and pens, and hands. They've cooked dinner, and grasped tree branches, and steered cars. They've shoveled snow, and cut through lake water, and planted flowers. I look at my hands, and they are familiar to me. They've participated in the life history that my mind occasionally leaps away from - jumping abruptly to different periods of time, like frames in a View Master. I know my life has been linear - my brain would have me think otherwise.
It's hard to believe that these same old hands have done as many things as they have, in my life. They've done what they were directed to do, and they've seemed to have a mind of their own. They've reached out voluntarily, and pulled back involuntarily. They've searched, and found, and lost. They've clenched in grief and in pain. They've gripped the covers in fear, and caressed in moments of passion. They've written a thousand thousand words, and tried to be the method of reconciliation between my thoughts and my voice. They've tried to help me define and understand myself. They've manifested clues to my inner workings in physical ways, inside - and through - the moments I've lived.
I've seen my face in many different mirrors. Same old nose, same chin, same freckles, moderately varying hairstyles. The eyes seem the same - blue, fringed with ridiculous eyebrows becoming more tamed by the year. But they're different - older, somehow. Wide open as ever, but shuttered. Sometimes I look into the eyes peering back out at me from the mirror, and they don't seem to be mine. They seem to contain a self-knowledge that forces me to realize hard truths about myself and my life. Sometimes, they seem unapproachable. Sometimes, I look away from meeting my own eyes in the mirror. If I do that myself, what must it be that other people see in them?
It's hard to reconcile the feeling in my mind with what I see in the mirror. Fairly unchanged from when I posed in the mirror behind the door in my bedroom at Grandma's house - wondering if my outfit would pass muster at school, checking my hemline before going to church, wondering if the bathing-suit clad body I saw qualified to the boys at the beach as pretty or not. Gone is the worry if I am deemed acceptable to others. Mostly. Better to say that the list of people I need to be accepted by has shrunk considerably - it is person-specific, rather than encompassing the general population of the universe, and the select population of my sphere of association. It is replaced with a worry that I am deemed acceptable to myself.
Eyes and hands. The two things that tell the most about a person, I think. I look at them both when I observe other people, and I draw theories and conclusions. Sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong. When I look at my own, I have no idea what story they tell.
I'm not sure how much the process of introspection is worth, really. Does it motivate me to change? Or does it motivate me to truly embrace everything I am, come hell or anybody else's opinion? I am a perverse creature - if I am accepted by those whom I wish to find me acceptable, I am motivated to better myself, to pay attention to their needs, to make an effort. Their good regard of me makes me want to maintain my "A" grade with them. If someone voices the desire for me to change or points out a shortcoming - legitimate or not - I am cemented in place and wailing inside my mind that I deserve to be loved exactly as I am. Self-flagellation due to personally recognized faults is one thing - defensiveness against those pointed out by others is another.
Should I change that? I don't know. How does a person know whether or not they should change something about themselves? Can a person change something that comes from within themselves? Or is that the easiest thing to change of all? Thought processes, reactions, emotional triggers, and the like - are they deeply entrenched inroads in our mentality, physical parts of our makeup that we can't just think away? Or are they just the force of habit, suggestions of a thought trail that can be shifted with concentration?
Oh, who the hell knows. Sometimes I get so sick of myself, and all the crap I think about.
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