The Business of Being – ‘Boring’ Edition
I am a boring person.
I admit it.
My favorite activities are reading, writing, walking, listening, humming and thinking.
I have never been drunk.
I have never been “high”.
I have never overdosed on any substance.
I have never been to a rowdy concert.
The only thing I’ve ever smoked was half of one cigarette. I decided it was nasty, and have never smoked again.
I have never had any interest in promiscuity, bar-hopping, or partying to any degree.
I like libraries, mellow music, video games, museums, nature, gardening, learning new things, and most media I view is scientific or some type of science fiction.
This makes me boring in the eyes of probably 80% of people between the ages of 15 and 45.
Happily, this no longer bothers me.
When I was a teenager, I used to lie to people all the time – telling fantastic and exciting details of a nonexistent life – because I felt inadequate. I was a quiet and reserved girl, and I did not fit in. At some point, I decided that I would force myself to be gregarious, so I began to talk to anyone I met, making acquaintances from a range of groups. I was blunt and brash, funny and flitty. My persona was that of a confident, daring, strong, smart, and carefree person.
Realistically, I had very little self-esteem, felt weak and passive, and I lived in fear. My thoughts essentially revolved around what other people thought of me. Or, rather, what I thought they were thinking about me. Every single thing I did was to please other people or done with the intent to make other people think I was “cool”. This was sad, and I hated it, but I didn’t know what else to do. I was a nobody that pretended to be a somebody just to avoid being targeted as a nobody. So, I became a chameleon – liking the things my friends liked, talking as they did, and so on.
Incidentally, my “friends” would periodically turn on me and begin to “hate” me. They would get angry when I would tell them about the bad mistakes they were making. They would believe any rumor that random strangers told them about me. They would confront me with things I’d supposedly said about them, not believing it when I would admit that I had said something similar – but in passing and as a part of a normal conversation (e.g. Friend: “I heard from Joe that you said that I was afraid to eat cheese, you <expletive>!” Me: “What are you talking about? Joe and I were talking about stinky cheeses and I told him that story about the time we ate some bad Gouda so you vowed never to eat it again…” Friend: “You <expletive>, why the <expletive> don’t you tell the truth for once in your life?!” Me: “Whatever, see you around.”). They were, in reality, not such close friends. Not that hormonal and irrational teenagers make good friends anyway… 😀
I would walk away from these interactions feeling like the worst and most worthless person in the world. Why was it so easy for people to hate me? Why were they so eager to find any negative thing about me and jump on it as a reason to end the friendship? What was the point of pretending anymore, if they hated me whether I was like them or not?
By the time I graduated from high school, I had no friends at all. There were a couple of people I would hang out with irregularly, but that was it. I spent my days wandering around, going to classes day and night, and counting the days until I could get out of that town.
When I went to college, it was better because nobody knew anything about me. I didn’t pretend to be some adventurous person. Basically, I started to act like the person I am, not the person I thought other people thought I should be. At first, there were still many times I would revert to my storytelling persona, trying to make my life seem more interesting than it actually was, but these incidences were not as frequent as they’d been in high school.
I spent some time with my dorm roommates, but they were mostly interested in drinking and sleeping around. I didn’t have much to say about my horticulture and ancient civilization classes that would interest them. I pretty much just went to a few meals with them on weekdays and escorted them to bed when they’d come home drunk on weekends.
I was part of the university band, and I had a lot more in common with the people there. But, there was a lot of hazing that was centered around getting drunk and doing annoyingly stupid things to be accepted. I refused to take part in these antics, and eventually just quit the band because I had lost interest in the music altogether.
I’d get invited to parties, and I didn’t want to hurt people’s feelings so I would go and take a fruit bowl. I’d greet my friends, take the fruit bowl to the kitchen, and then silently slip out the door. I’d get a call the next day from my friends, saying they’d eaten all the fruit and had my container, then asking when and why I’d left the party.
By the middle of my freshman year of college, I’d gotten sick of most of the friends I’d made and was down to one friend who happened to be very much like the me I really am. That friendship was probably the only thing that kept me sane during that time frame. But, even then, I had many secrets from my friend and she didn’t know everything that was going on with me.
I was at the bottom of a very deep depression and hated everything and everyone, myself most of all. I was very careless and had many risky behaviors, living only in the hopes that I would soon die. My happiest thought of any given day was, “Maybe I will die today!”, and that thought made me smile. Suicide was too easy of an escape, because I thought that I only deserved to die in the most horrible and violent ways imaginable. I would intentionally try to orchestrate these violent deaths I fantasized about. It didn’t matter to me anymore what everyone else was doing or what they thought of me. I was sick of the decadence and mindlessness with which people went about their lives. Much of that time is unclear to me, I can only surmise that my brain has blocked it out as a defense mechanism.
When I moved into my own apartment and had kicked off the bonds associated with all of my old “friends”, things started to get a little better because I had solitude. I was free to breathe, I was free to relax, I was free from people. I went to work, then came home and did whatever I wanted to do. I started to understand that it was OK to be me. It was OK to be “boring”. It was OK for people to think I was boring. Because, I can’t be anything else.
I started to realize that I was never made for the life that other people believed to be so exciting and wonderful. I just don’t have those urges or interests naturally. I don’t even have the urge to pretend to be like other people naturally. I have to pretend to want to pretend just to pretend.
So, finally, I stopped pretending.
I left.
I hid.
I separated myself from everyone else and became a blank slate.
It took me seven years of hiding and fixing those things that were broken in me before I was finally able to come to terms with this reality: I will never be what they want me to be.
I will never be anything else but Me.
I should not hide Me.
I should not pretend to be another Me.
I should love Me.
And so, this is my life – the pursuit of Me.
I am living a life of hiking and nature-loving and foraging and computer coding and knitting and playing and singing and gardening and loving and enjoying and experiencing and seeing and hearing and learning and feeling and being and thanking and Living. I am alive. I am Me.
Maybe it’s boring, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I love you, dear reader, thank you for taking the time to read this long, boring, message. 🙂
– Jane