| I apologize, but it's another day of self-analysis.
I was thinking about this yesterday... For a great deal of my life, I would
try to be like the people I idolized. Maybe "idolize" is too strong of
a word... but I would always end up taking on the characteristics of people
I was trying to be friends with. I wanted to feel like I belonged in a
group, even if the group was just one other person. And all through high
school, I continued to take on characteristics of those I was interested
in having a friendship or relationship with. I would agree with whatever
they believed in, I would talk about what they liked to talk about, I would
act like they act... High school is supposed to be an experience of finding
yourself... but my high school experience seems to be more about losing
myself. There's always been a part of me that was undeniably "Ross" and
no one else... But I always mixed that real part of me with whatever I
absorbed along the way. Then when the group or the friendship or the relationship
fell apart, I would discard that part of me that wasn't actually "me"...
only to soon gain a new set of traits which equally did not belong to me.
What I'm getting at here is this: Though I didn't notice it until yesterday,
I haven't done that in a couple months. I haven't tried to be anything
I'm not just so people like me. And maybe that is the reason I have been
rather insecure as of late: I'm not hiding behind my absorption of personality.
I'm just being me, doing what I like to do, talking about what I like to
talk about, and thinking what I like to think.
Oh, and if you haven't already... take the poll.
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Image of the Day
Yes, I know... it's a boring image of the day. Plus it's the second
astronomical one in a row... but I had this overexposed image of the comet
Hale-Bopp on my computer, and I couldn't resist using an image that ties
into today's topic.
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Quote of the Day - Ralph Ellison, "Battle Royal"
"All my life, I had been looking for
something; and everywhere I turned, someone tried to tell me what it was.
I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and
even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and
asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations
to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with:
that I am nobody but myself."
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