The very random adventures of a psychology student, geeklet and all-round dork.


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The long overdue update

So I have been toying with the idea of resurrecting this blog for a long while. And right now it’s definitely time, because there’s a whole ton of stuff going through my head that requires some serious sorting through and attempting to make some sense of. It’s likely going to turn into a long, confused and confusing ramble. You’ve been warned. And today’s topic is…

Identity

A pet topic if ever there was one. Who is this Godiva character, anyway? I can’t help but feel that any answer I can offer is either too inclusive or too lacking in sincerity to be of much use. I adapt to roles so easily that it’s not always easy to discern whether I am acting in role, being myself, or whether the role is simply a part of myself that has gone unacknowledged for a while. Now wait, I realize that this sounds harsh. I’m going to elaborate a little and see if it makes more sense.

The good

Maybe two months ago I was attending a sales seminar at my company; translating for the foreign participants, assisting the trainer and generally helping to make sure the whole thing went smoothly. Things were good. The trainer had just set the group one of your typical self-esteem/self-actualization tasks, “Name three things about you that you truly, honestly think are outstanding and beautiful, both mentally and physically.” As the participants were pondering this, he turned to me: “Same question for you. What are your top three attributes?”

I used to hate questions like that with a passion that is hard to equal. I was a self-conscious girl, with a tendency to be painfully aware of my shortcomings and oddities. I was genuinely surprised to find that it wasn’t hard – not to mention embarrassing – to answer the question honestly. There was a sense of increasing acceptance of the person I am, the way I look and the things I do that I appear to have acquired over the last year or so. I’ve noticed a marked difference in the way I act towards people professionally – in accepting praise and making sure I deserve it, and learning to raise valid points in scientific discussion even without being familiar with every aspect of the topic; privately, in displaying extraversion I never knew I had; physically and mentally, in learning to take myself right to the edge of what I previously thought possible and enjoying the journey; hell, even the way I dress. I’m not sure whether to be shocked or glad that the chick who used to love black has learned to color-coordinate. That’s probably not a word, but you’re welcome to keep it. Cheers! Oh, and what is probably the most amazing accomplishment to my mind: I’ve learned to live alone, and quite contently too. I’ve been living in this apartment by myself for almost a year now, and somewhere along the line I even stopped freaking whenever I found that the only familiar people I had seen in several days were my co-workers.

The guilt

(I just know someone’s about to crack a joke about Catholics here. :p)

So yeah, as much as the current me is an upgrade from previous versions, many of the same bugs are still around. Like my total, pathetic inability to take care of some things without putting them off at least for a while first. This doesn’t often affect my corporate work, but my thesis has been suffering badly (although I realize that there are other reasons for this as well, see below).

Furthermore – and this is probably illustrated well by this post – I feel overly self-absorbed at times, as though the rest of the world had real problems yet I was the one complaining. When I hear this particular thought from others, I like to remind them that “your own problems are still the most important in the world, simply because they are what you have to deal with. Everyone else’s relative position on the scale won’t make your life any better or worse.” I dunno. This is probably randomness.

And then there’s tougher matters, of course. Today I went back to my ex-boyfriend’s place after almost a year to drool over his new computers. And it was just plain frightening. We were together for five years, during which there was mutual neglect, fuckups, and two major incidents of cheating on my behalf. Whenever I recount the story to a friend, I can sit and watch them bite their tongue not to call me a raving bitch, and I know these are the words I might use if I heard the same account from a third party. I’m hard pressed to think of anything worse to do than hurting someone I care about, and at the same time, I have no idea whether I can stop myself doing it over and over again. This sounds so corny it’s painful, especially knowing that trying to protect people in the wrong kind of situation only tends to make things that much worse.

Half this rant is probably due to experiencing the infinite oddness of going back to a place where you lived for 3.5 years, thus remembering the person you were, who is frighteningly unlike your current persona. Was the anglophile geek chick any more “me” than the cheerful body mod devotee, or the teenager that used to read Latin as a hobby? Was none of them even close? All of them? Chances are I’m wary of change – as much as I crave it – because it always feels like losing something. Sure, I just have to look in the mirror to remember that I’m probably ten times happier now than I was a year (or two, or ten) ago. But then part of me is always going to miss feeding half a dozen friends dinner in between managing two full majors, or even dancing till 4a.m. in high school with a guy for whom my love was so unrequited it made me physically ill. Odd? Yeah, sure. It doesn’t always make sense to me, I certainly don’t expect it to make too much sense to anyone else.

The 95% rule

I realize that a lot of those things are a matter of my current life phase; my observations have been replicated to varying degrees in conversations with friends. I know, for instance, that half my psych student friends are procrastinating on their respective theses because getting our degrees invariably means throwing ourselves at unpleasantly uncertain futures. Some of us would be happy enough – or just even more scared, depending on how you see it – knowing at least which country that future’s going to be set in. And that takes me to my concluding point, now that I’ve written down all these things and thus finally calmed down a little about them. I find that, for everything I do, I’m more or less certain what I want; and even in the best cases, certainty is no more than 95%. I.e., I’m about 95% sure of where I want to live and with whom, and whether or not I can do better now than I have before. I’m tempted to make some psych geek joke about confidence intervals and alpha errors here, but I’m trying my best not to.

Those pesky 5% give me hell at times.
posted by Godiva at 6:09 PM