So, whats happening even more now that I am in Karachi is that every now and then I meet someone who I have never met before but who has read something I have written. When it happens by chance, it usually makes me completely mute and awkward (everyone: wave to Nabila!). And sometimes, it makes me a little hysterical because the typical nature of my writing is memoir style where I share material from my life and my take on it. I get the internal giggles, my imagination goes into over drive and I think up various scenarios of what sort of awkwardness would ensue if I leaned in real close to the other person and said in a Captain Picard voice, “Please tell me 10,000 personal things about yourself and your thoughts and confusions on them so that we are heretofore on equal footing.” But when it happens by planning, I get me the jitters. See, what also happens every now and then, someone asks to meet me, or turns out to be the friend of a friend that I will meet at so and so’s party, and until recently those sort of planned meetings made me EXTREMELY nervous. A whole self hating internal dialogue would begin: “Okay, honey, the gig is up. They’re going to meet you and they will see you for the fraud that you are. They will see that you are completely uninteresting and incapable of any intelligence or charm. Humor is beyond you and kind warmth? Fuhgeddaboutit.” Then, what would happen in these meetings, after my unhelpful internal rant, is that either I would go into overdrive, straining myself to be all what I assume someone wanted me to be, trying my best to be what I imagined was interesting and charming and oh so Utterly Fascinating (this left me exhausted) or that I would give up on social graces entirely, go into a shell, and crash and burn through the encounter (this left me feeling bad and unworthy). In both scenarios, I would end up swearing NEVER again to meet anyone who has read my writing. But after several such episodes, THANKFULLY I realized how ridiculous I was being. It’s taken effort for me to refocus and calm down but I think I am getting there. I am understanding that in my online presence, I am a writer, that is all. As a writer, I am simply trying to make sense of my days, observing the complexities of my own very human heart, and taking the minutiae of my life as a manifestation of larger lessons. Thats it. And when it comes to my personality, I am understanding now that, just like anybody else, I am a jumble of contradictions. One me is not any real-er than the other me and I don’t need to try and make any version real-er than the other. I am not Utterly Fascinating. I am smart and I am dumb. I am confident and I am shy. I am loud and I am quiet. I am funny and I am dull. I am kind and I am petty. I am well read/well rounded and I am completely jaahil. When we are younger, in our teens and twenties, we are desperate to be a certain self. The bestest, most exciting, most interesting, version of us at all times, especially when we think we will be judged. We are desperate to not just be liked, but to be admired. We reject the idea of a “normal” life or being “normal” ourselves. We have a secret desire to be Utterly Fascinating to whoever meets us…and usually we are convinced that, in fact, we ARE Utterly Fascinating and anyone who cannot see that is misguided and unworthy of our attention. But, I think, all my over-30s readers will agree and the older you are, the more vehemently and wisely you will nod to this (so, 40s, 50s, 60s, please say aye here!): If there are any advantages to no longer being very young (or young at all) they are this - We are becoming comfortable with all of our selves, and all of those selves’ inherent contradictions. We contain Whitman’s “multitudes” and we are both proud and humbled to acknowledge all the shades of gray that exist in us, in everyone and in life itself. We don’t need to impress anyone or convince them about our wonderfulness because we realize that the ones who matter will see us as wonderful despite (or maybe because of) all our messiness and flaws. We are comfortable in our normality leading our regular, everyday lives because we’ve finally understood that the “normal” is usually where the gold is. We are so many, many things but… We are not Utterly Fascinating and we are so very, VERY okay with that.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 08:15:31 +0000
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