Blogs seem to be all the rage these past 10 or 15 years, and why wouldn't they be? We get to express our thoughts and feelings openly and free to friends and strangers, and connect with one another on a personal and intellectual level through our own creative words. It's innate within humans to want to share what we are thinking and to express ourselves. I mean, that is why we have such a complex language structure, right? To communicate and express ourselves clearly with one another? I believe we all want to share our thoughts with one another, but many times social constructs dictate when, where, what, why and to who we may share our thoughts with.
For years I was wanting to get my thoughts out, but I have learned it has been easier to sometimes just keep my mouth shut. It is just easier, period. People then view me as a polite, shy girl who is so patient, nice, and good. It is true though, too. I am nice a lot because I like seeing people happy with me, and I am good because I believe in good towards others. I try to be very polite because I know that if I don't constantly try to watch myself and be polite, a certain type of social ineptitude and unawareness slips through and I end up feeling ignorant to what they are thinking or feeling, and if they are growing unhappy with me. I have learned to be shy to strangers in order to make a social life easier, as then I don't open up to too many people who don't really want to hear about me. And I am patient because I worked hard to learn it. I really didn't used to be, and sometimes I do lose my patience, but it was something that I had inadvertently learned while I went through the intensive training and then my volunteering I did for 3 years at a crisis center. I had learned to just sit back, and how to listen, to people.
Learning to listen was something I thought I knew how to do, but it wasn't until I worked at the crisis center that I really understood what it meant to listen. When someone takes that extremely difficult reach to pick up a phone and call a stranger, they really just need someone to listen to them. Most of the time they never needed someone to tell them what to do, but rather to just listen because, well, it's their life on the line many times. I would wonder some days at the center if my dad had ever reached out to just be listened to, or did he just keep it bottled inside him? But me listening to all those callers gave me a gift of patience to hear what they needed to say, and I felt it was a gift that maybe my father was giving me (I'll come back to that later). Listening gave me the immense patience that led me to change my major to education, because all of a sudden I felt I had the patience and caring to handle kids, parents, and even the education system in order to pursue what I really wanted to do with my life, which is obviously working in education. The only problem that came with all of that listening was that I forgot that sometimes I just need to express myself as well.
There are few people who really know me anymore, but it is not anyone's fault but my own. It is also neither tragic nor unwanted. It has been... well, safe, that way. I have been able to go on as an adult, and be viewed as an equal peer who is working hard at creating a strong stable life for her and a future family. That is all I really want as well, to be viewed as an equal strong woman who has meaning and purpose behind everything that I have done in my adult life. But I feel that people don't know how strong I am because I don't tell anyone about the things that have made me into an tremendously strong woman. So often, I just want to shout out my story because I hold a certain pride to what I have done and for good reason. But when I start to tell my story to people, I regret doing so because all of a sudden I feel I have put them in an uncomfortable position in the way that they don't know how to react with nothing other than pity and excessive sympathy. They mean well, and it is how we are trained to react, but I feel the pity undermines my strength I have gained. I am proud of where I have come from and where I am going, and many times just want to share my thought. I am a big thinker, and I wanted to write down my thoughts and have them open to read or not. I have a constant stream of thoughts that zip through my head all the time, and I have a hard time myself keeping up with them. I do tend to over think everything, but I am constantly analyzing everything and wondering questions like, "Why does this happen?" or "Why do we do this?". Or to put it my way, "Y does this happen?" or "Y do we do this?"
As I teenager I used to keep a journal, and in one year I filled somewhere between 8-12 journals. I have always loved to write and viewed it as such a poetic form of expression in so many ways. I have really missed it. I spend so much time on the computer that I want to use it as a new form of expressing myself, whoever happens to be reading. I figured I should jump on this blog bandwagon and have a platform for which I can write down and organize my scrambled jumbled pile of words that fills my head each day. I can have this anonymous open black box to speak into, and not care who is reading, or listening. All are welcome to come and go as they please, and this is just to have an open book to share.
