Saturday, August 29, 2009

What You Think Of Me...

Well, so much for the “one post per week” idea; it’s been an entire month. As we used to say in the Navy, “No excuse, sir.” I don’t actually need one. It’s my blog; I can post whenever I doggone well please. If you think I’m not doing it properly, that’s your problem. Deal with it.

All of which is offered with my tongue in cheek and brings me to the topic. The full quotation is, “What you think of me is none of my business.” It comes from some book or other which I have long since forgotten, and as I recall it’s original meaning was that we should quit worrying about what other people think of us. There was a lot of stuff about discarding the worry regarding other people’s opinions.

I took a slightly different message from it, though.

All my life I not only wanted people to like and approve of me, I wanted it to a degree that caused me to try to become who I thought they would like and approve of. I was not me, I was an actor; acting not one role, but many roles. I acted a different role in each environment and all of it was, of course, massively dishonest.

It worked at times and failed at times; some people liked me and others did not. But it was not the real me that they liked or disliked, it was the role that I was playing that formed their opinion. Part of me knew that and, needless to say, I lived in a vast gulf of loneliness.

Honesty precludes role playing and today it seems that most people who know me think rather well of me. I don’t ask, because I don’t really live my life based an any need for approval, so it isn't something that registers with me. What I do know is that, whether you like me or not, it’s now the real me that you like or dislike, and not some role that I’m playing.

So whatever your opinion is, I earned it and I can deal with it.