Describe a decision you made in the past that helped you learn or grow.
Every decision I have ever made has helped me learn and grow, but by far the biggest was thinking “I could be good at blogging.”
This is because in my archives, I have solid evidence of what I was thinking during past mistakes, and can thereby change my behavior when I’ve been doing something for x number of years and it still isn’t working for me. I saw other blogs and I really liked them, that people just talked about themselves, writing what they knew. I have a general working knowledge about everything on earth and can talk about anything to anyone for a few minutes…. but on minute four, I got nothin.
I am a master of none, and writing is the only way I know how to express all of that. I turned feeling insecure and lonely into being able to make connections and draw parallels and be comfortable talking about my emotions in real life, with the caveat that I sense changes in energies quickly and I’ll shut down if I feel you’re not really catching my meaning. It gave me the ability to choose a direction and not a distraction, because I can tell you how “Wild Bill” Donovan started the OSS, why it doesn’t matter whether there’s a God or not, and how to cook using concepts and I’ll throw in locking down your router for free if you’re ridiculously good looking…. and most people are, depending on their personalities.
Writing taught me that I’m demisexual, that I don’t start to feel an attraction until my brain is excited to know someone. That I want to grok them… and I’ll be delighted if you think that’s dirty (it’s not).
I want you to know how the token minority became Will Truman and *not* Jack McFarland. I want you to know how Will Truman became Caitlin Jenner, the acceptable trans woman.
I want you to know how much I rail against being the token minority because it’s time I didn’t need ammunition. I’m tired of the income disparity between male and female couples, so gay (usually white) men are the loudest and get what they want. It’s why HRC didn’t support trans people for so long.
Acceptable minorities promote the majority system down to their haircuts, while minorities that wear their differences proudly and have their own culture are under just as much attack as taking over Native American land, it’s just a different culture. We’ve created a tape in cis, white men that they deserve everything, because they created that system where in order to get things, we had to ask them first.
For Native Americans, we just killed everyone we didn’t like. And that pain continues today, it’s just more emotional upheaval now. I was still looking around before holding my wife’s hand in Houston because I’d forgotten in Portland. Trying to be an acceptable minority has cost me more than you can possibly imagine and I’m done.
It’s exhausting trying to be acceptable when you know you’re not and you never will be, because this system won’t end in my lifetime. The only thing I can do is rebel against it, without actively trying to be the least likable person you’ve ever met. Writers get more and more protective of their energy as they age, beaten down by the process. Alternatively, I can be really funny and engaging, to the point where people are surprised when I say I’m an introvert. It’s not that I’m shy. It’s that my social battery varies wildly. No one who meets me at a party would recognize me the next day (in terms of mood and behavior), because they’re meeting two people. One is me when I haven’t been around people in a long time, the other is when I’ve suffered internal bleeding from taking on every emotion in the room… because of course, I don’t stick to the dance floor. I want to go where people are talking, because I’m always listening. I don’t remember anything verbatim, but it moves me to hear people talk about their problems and feel empathy for them. I often find it’s easier to soak up socialization by listening than talking until I’ve realized that I haven’t said anything for a half hour and the point is for me to actually talk because I don’t do it that often. I write, yes, but I don’t talk to people every day using my physical voice.
I think we have covered this- that I don’t like my voice because I don’t hear myself all that often. That in my head, I can read me like I want to sound, which is generally Matthew Perry in The West Wing.
I’m not a journalist, because I don’t look up anything objective. I don’t even link to things most of the time because if you’re curious, you’ll search for something. It takes work off me when I don’t need to care whether you go back to an entry or not. My current favorite of anything recent is “Your Blog Makes You Sound Like a Dick.” I keep laughing about it over and over because it was just the truest thing I’d ever heard in my life. It’s just hard when people don’t get that it’s the point. If I was 90, you’d write it off as old man grouchiness. It’s kind of true. I’m tired about a lot of shit. I’m just Tall. Mustache. Fishing Hat….. the kind of person that if I was male, in Texas they’d call me a “good ol boy,” what you call someone that has so kindly relieved you of your previously held opinions with a yarn that always ends in “you’re a dumbass.”
For people who are thought of as bumpkins across the nation, let me tell you that there is nothing smoother than a Texan telling you to go to hell, helping you pack, buying the tickets, and complimenting you on your choice of vacation spots. I’m riffing on Churchill, but you get the drift. We are every bit as bitchy as New Yorkers, we just hide the knife in a pie.
So, when I get on my high horse, it’s just me being a Southern asshole who’ll bitch slap you with a casserole dish on my hip.
Listening to it is optional. Maybe I’m not a reliable narrator when it comes to trying to describe other people’s emotions so that I can describe mine. It is not my intention, but it certainly happens and I am not immune to that fact. Everything about this blog is subjective, but it gives me what I need to function. Right now I’m working on an entry with a writing prompt that Bryn gave me about if I could go back in time and change anything without literally telling the future, what would I do? My short answer was doing everything I could to stop MacArthur from being an asshole and not listening to Bill Donovan when he told him that his entire air fleet was about to get bombed and to get his planes in the air. MacArthur wanted military to show intelligence just how much they didn’t know anything, and our bases on the Phillipines were bombed nine hours after Pearl Harbor. I don’t know how I would have done it. Maybe meeting MacArthur early (teenage) and becoming the one who can tell him he’s full of shit early on, so that when it counts, my word is law… because at that point we’ve had years of recognizing that we’re both angry hothead jackasses that pop off and regret.
But that’s just spitballing. I thought I could think bigger than that. Don’t change your dial.
Stories That Are All True 