When I enter the break area and I see others there I purposely avoid them, and when I'm already sitting there I find myself hoping they don't sit next to me. It is shyness that gets me, when I think about it. I find myself having no idea how to be social with people. It is easy to be cute and funny, and talk to people while we are all working in the kitchen, there is a common goal we are all focusing on and there are many ways for me to leave a conversation if I want to. Also, when you force people to be together for that long of a time, they will almost always think of something to say first. I don't have that feeling, ever, of awkward silence. I can stand, sit, work, whatever next to someone for hours and not say a thing, it does not even get to me. The only sort of conversational thoughts I have are what the person next to me may say. So I wait, and sure enough someone will start something.
I'm great at talking to people when they talk first, I am a good listener. I can talk about any topic without much trouble. It is the pieces in between that scare me. I do not know how to small talk and small talk is where you really get to know each other. Talking about the weather, or what's going on in the Ukraine right now, or movies and tv shows you have watched are noise between the things that we say that make us us. Most people call it flirting, but it isn't all, always, flirtatious. You state a fact or ask a question, "Hey, did you hear what's going on with Russia and the Ukraine lately?" either you wait for a response or say something else, but eventually the two of you will share opinions. "Yeah it's crazy. Russia should get the hell out, they don't belong there."
I talk in facts because I'm worried of sharing my opinion. I have come to learn my opinions are mostly unpopular, or too thoughtful for people to accept well. This is something I have spoken to my therapist with. I have difficulty finding people to talk to, to connect with. Her response was, "You may have to talk about the Olympics for a while until you find a connection." Suggesting I talk about boring, unimportant crap just to start conversations because that is what most people talk about.
(btw, what's going on in the Ukraine is scary shit, not unimportant.)
My life story leaves little room for the mundane. Dealing with being a transitioning female has given me too strong of a perspective on what is important and what isn't. I have tried, throughout my life, to show interest in what the average person does and I just can't do it. Television is just utter nonsense, movies are mostly the same thing, listening to someone talk about how their day is ruined because they have to work late and can't get their nails done makes me stare blankly and think "Really? That's how hard your life is? C'mon."
Back to being social, my other problem is I'm too honest. The other thing people do to get to know each other is ask personal questions. That's something else I'm not very good at. I rarely ask people where they are from, or if they have a girl/boyfriend/partner, what they do outside of work or whatever setting we meet in, various ways of asking what their life was like before I entered it. I think it is personal, and also people tend to divulge that information without much prompting. Ask anyone who has gotten to know me over the years, I'm a mystery. I don't talk about myself much unless you ask, and I assume everyone is like that, even though most people are not. After you get to know me, after you've gotten through the majority of my walls I am an open book, with only a few pages missing.
So I have no interest in talking about the usual mundane crap people do, I'm scared of getting personal and I am not very good at asking people about themselves. That combination leaves little room for me to have a one on one conversation. I have a few topics that float around in my head. This transition I am going through and all of the spin offs of that, like the family I no longer have, the life I have left behind. More lately of how happy I am, or why I am happy, and the little girl I am doing my best to cheer up. I wouldn't mind talking about these things if telling people about them would not suddenly change their opinions of me. I have been asked at work why I'm in such a good mood and my honesty almost got the better of me. I wanted to say something like "My skin feels a-maze-ing and it is so good to feel like that now." Something that seems totally pointless to talk about, but it is momentous to my life. I do not miss the irony of how this is important to me, but not to others, so I keep my mouth shut. My answer to that question was something completely deflecting, and I do not remember what it was.
The whole point of this post was to get to how it makes me feel, how I have felt most of my life. Sitting there, on break, with several co-workers nearby talking about their lives, chatting away with each other made me feel lonely. A sort of lonely I am not sure how I can combat, the sort that feels like there is no change in sight and my best decision is to just move on and accept that I will be lonely forever. As I have mentioned, I know all of my shortcomings, but I am totally without the knowledge of how to work around them. In most situations, I am alone in a room full of people.
One thing for sure though, if you are one of the people in the room, you would have no idea. I can talk and joke with people. I'm laughing and smiling, letting people keep my attention, getting others attention when I want. It is all a charade though, it is how I have learned to get through life while hiding who I really was, and it has left me without the tools to actually socialize with people as the woman I want.
I guess this is the real point, yes I am lonely, but I really do not want to be any more. I have done enough of pushing people away to hide myself. Now I want to flourish as the woman I am, and a lot of that has to do with the friends I keep. It is hard for me to see where one ends and the other begins, where the pretend socializing gives way to the new me. It is as difficult to see as my future. What career will I have, where will I live, who will I be, and how do I make and be a friend as the real me?
I have come across a few things said by people I barely know that are giving me something to go on. One person told me, " I just thought you were a bubbly little girl." That statement has stuck with me, it is giving me some direction on who I am, and where to go. I guess keep going is a better way to say it. I can not say that that was what I was going for, a bubbly little girl, but it is more or less one of the ways I would like people to see who I am. When I was given that description of myself I was surprised. I am little, especially to this guy, but to be called bubbly was unexpected. That was a few days ago, today I was told while chit chatting that people... pretty much the entire kitchen staff and a good bit of the wait staff, have taken noticed of, and have talked to each other at least once about, my dancing at work. In a conversation that I was not part of someone said to the group, "Something something... Rebecca is dancing all the time, it's so cute."
That is about as much as I know about my personality. I know that seems counter intuitive, maybe even especially coming from me, to hear me suggest all I know from my personality is a few things I have heard others say about me. However, there are limits to what inner searching can do for you. Yes, I completely believe everyone should take the time, far, far more time then most give themselves, to search who you are, according to you. But a large part of who we are comes from the reception others give us. We are social animals after all. I still turn this inward, I think to myself, "ok, I'm the cute bubbly dancing little girl in the social circle of work." and I decide, based on feelings, if that is something I like or not. I have come to realize it is, so therefore it is part of my personality, part of the person I want people to see me as.
It still does not give me much to go on when it comes to actual conversation, actually getting to know people, or letting them know me. Even just being in a group of people and not coming off as a total social moron. It is a start, though. People see me as cheerful, which is a complete 180 from the person I was before and that is exactly where I want to be. Chances are, like everything else in my life, I am over thinking this. I just need to put myself in the situation and see what happens. The Lonely just really gets to me some times and I wish I did not have to grow into it. It seems however, literally, absolutely everything about this transition is something I have to grow into.
The whole point of this post was to get to how it makes me feel, how I have felt most of my life. Sitting there, on break, with several co-workers nearby talking about their lives, chatting away with each other made me feel lonely. A sort of lonely I am not sure how I can combat, the sort that feels like there is no change in sight and my best decision is to just move on and accept that I will be lonely forever. As I have mentioned, I know all of my shortcomings, but I am totally without the knowledge of how to work around them. In most situations, I am alone in a room full of people.
One thing for sure though, if you are one of the people in the room, you would have no idea. I can talk and joke with people. I'm laughing and smiling, letting people keep my attention, getting others attention when I want. It is all a charade though, it is how I have learned to get through life while hiding who I really was, and it has left me without the tools to actually socialize with people as the woman I want.
I guess this is the real point, yes I am lonely, but I really do not want to be any more. I have done enough of pushing people away to hide myself. Now I want to flourish as the woman I am, and a lot of that has to do with the friends I keep. It is hard for me to see where one ends and the other begins, where the pretend socializing gives way to the new me. It is as difficult to see as my future. What career will I have, where will I live, who will I be, and how do I make and be a friend as the real me?
I have come across a few things said by people I barely know that are giving me something to go on. One person told me, " I just thought you were a bubbly little girl." That statement has stuck with me, it is giving me some direction on who I am, and where to go. I guess keep going is a better way to say it. I can not say that that was what I was going for, a bubbly little girl, but it is more or less one of the ways I would like people to see who I am. When I was given that description of myself I was surprised. I am little, especially to this guy, but to be called bubbly was unexpected. That was a few days ago, today I was told while chit chatting that people... pretty much the entire kitchen staff and a good bit of the wait staff, have taken noticed of, and have talked to each other at least once about, my dancing at work. In a conversation that I was not part of someone said to the group, "Something something... Rebecca is dancing all the time, it's so cute."
That is about as much as I know about my personality. I know that seems counter intuitive, maybe even especially coming from me, to hear me suggest all I know from my personality is a few things I have heard others say about me. However, there are limits to what inner searching can do for you. Yes, I completely believe everyone should take the time, far, far more time then most give themselves, to search who you are, according to you. But a large part of who we are comes from the reception others give us. We are social animals after all. I still turn this inward, I think to myself, "ok, I'm the cute bubbly dancing little girl in the social circle of work." and I decide, based on feelings, if that is something I like or not. I have come to realize it is, so therefore it is part of my personality, part of the person I want people to see me as.
It still does not give me much to go on when it comes to actual conversation, actually getting to know people, or letting them know me. Even just being in a group of people and not coming off as a total social moron. It is a start, though. People see me as cheerful, which is a complete 180 from the person I was before and that is exactly where I want to be. Chances are, like everything else in my life, I am over thinking this. I just need to put myself in the situation and see what happens. The Lonely just really gets to me some times and I wish I did not have to grow into it. It seems however, literally, absolutely everything about this transition is something I have to grow into.
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