“Most bloggers are emotionally unstable and are often
awkward in social situations, which is why so many of us turned to blogging in
the first place.” –Jenny Lawson Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir
While I don’t believe I’m emotionally unstable, I do attest
to being quirky (the nice word for weird) and slightly uncomfortable in social
situations; especially with people I don’t know well. So yes, I couldn’t help but laugh and kind of
relate as I read that line last night.
I totally turned to blogging because I have stories I want
to share, but I hate telling long stories in front of people. Besides the fact that I turn beet red and
start stumbling over words whenever I notice undivided attention turned on me,
I also tend to get cut off every time I begin talking, and I immediately assume
it’s because people aren’t interested in what I have to say (part of my very
mild self-diagnosed OCD that I’ll get to soon).
When I’m in a big group of people, once I get cut off, I can usually
just trail off and am luckily forgotten about.
But if I’m one-on-one and get cut off, I feel like I need to follow
through with what I began, so I’ll usually just cut to the chase, leaving out
all the entertaining parts and ending with a lame ass story that not even I was
interested in hearing, which then leaves me blushing and ashamed that I opened my mouth again.
Like I mentioned earlier, I’m pretty sure I have a very mild
case of OCD. If anyone else got cut off
while talking, they’d brush it aside and continue on with their story or leave
their tale for another day. But not
me. I sit there thinking how dumb I was
to have even started talking, and put myself down for even thinking people
would want to listen to what I have to say.
I begin to wonder if others are secretly laughing at me and privately
glad that I was shut up. I seriously
obsess about this for the next minute or so, completely ignoring the other
conversation around me, but putting on a fake smile and nod so that I can
hopefully fit in while I calm my ass down. That’s the tip of the iceberg to my social
awkwardness, and the showcase to my quirkiness.
When I was a kid, my hands always had to be equal; and a lot of the times, this equality
revolved around the staircase in my house.
If my right hand lightly slapped the banister, my left hand had to slap
it as well. Sometimes, I’d even go back
up the few stairs so that I could hit the banister in the approximate same
place. We also had a light switch at the
top and foot of our stairs that controlled the same overhead light. If I flipped the switch upstairs, then I had
to flip it downstairs with my opposite hand.
This worked well if the light was off, because ultimately, the light
would end up off again. It led to issues
when the light was on, however. I would
flip the switch off upstairs, then switch it back on downstairs, which would
leave me with a sense of guilt for leaving a light on in an area I wasn’t going
to be in, so I’d flip that same switch back off (with the opposite hand of
course), then be left with two uncomfortable options: leave the light alone and
walk away with my other hand feeling left out, or let equality prevail at the
expense of running electricity. I
usually chose the latter; assuming one of my brothers would save the world’s
energy problem for me.
For some reason, I grew out of that; maybe it was moving out
of the house for college. Nowadays, my
OCD is mostly manifested in my placement of objects. If an array of items is in front of me, I’ll
usually line them up neat and tidy.
Everything on the desk of my classroom had a specific place that I would
fix constantly throughout the day. Just
last week, as I was eating a clam dinner, Greg noticed me carefully stacking my
empty shells off to the side of my plate.
After he knocked them over, I wanted to stack them back up, but instead,
I stubbornly settled on making the fallen towers more spread out equally across
my plate. One of the shells that used to
be on top was sadly layered by another shell, and as much as I told myself to
let it go, I had to pinch it from the bottom of the plate and set it delicately
on the top: it’s rightful place among it’s fellow shells.
I’ve been delighted reading the above-mentioned book, and
pouring over her blog. Jenny Lawson has
not only given me the renewed energy I needed to get my own blog up and running
again, but she’s validated the reasons I write, and makes me feel not so alone
in my weirdness. I actually feel pretty normal
compared to her, though after this entry, many of you might disagree.
