adelaidemedblog

I really don’t like that I’m impressionable. Things people say seem to alter my thinking more than I am conscious of at the moment in time, and it’s not until later that I realize the trap I have (once again) fallen into.

I received an uplifting email the other day (month, now). It was from my MPPD tutor, commenting on my MPPD journal, which was basically made up of many of the posts I’ve written up here. From the top of my head til the end of my toes, this lady is exactly the kind of person who influences me the most. This is because I respect her very much - it seems like she does many of the things I would aspire to do, if I had aspirations. And so I come around to the point that I don’t seem to have very much of a self-identity, or rather, I don’t seem to have an aim in my life, and more specifically, Jonathan’s life seems to be a pretty much go-as-I-please-but-not-too-fast merry-go-round. JM (my tutor) wrote quite a lot in response to my journal, and though she said she had forgotten most of it, she was very astute in her comments. Or is that just me worshiping someone who I respect, again? For those of you who don’t know, JM is that lady who gave that talk/lecture straight after that MPPD lecture “Living with a Disability”.

One thing she said was that many of us feel that Med is a bit of a factory line, sorting the good from the bad, and if you ever think twice about doing things your own way, you’re out. So you have no choice but to follow the rules, stay in line, on the conveyor belt, for a good 6 long years, at which point you grapple onto and climb up to another conveyor belt, which runs another 4-10 years depending on what you do. So she said control is important in people’s lives and I would have been an idiot if I’d ever thought anything to the contrary. I also have more to say about that in another post, based on my current experiences with a certain funny doctor.

Another point she made was that the perceived difference between the sexes is not as great as, well, perceived. That is, perceived by me specifically, but also by the popular media, which is representative of society as a whole.

The third and most impressionaballistically (a combination of multiple words to emphasise my point..) __ (don’t know how to follow this new adjective) point is that: Life is totally boring if you stay within comfort zones. What makes the impressionability of this (omg that is actually a word…) so great is that I had been mulling over this point for some time, asking myself why I was shy and whether that was OK or not. So here’s the VIP (very important point): I consistently reach points of time in my life that parade as milestones, and, like those cunning biatches at beauty contests, confuse me into believing that they are somehow more important than the points in time rubbing up next to them. Things happen in life, I get excited, and think things are going to change, like thinking I’ve got it all down with P, only to get a poo-in-the-pants, wee-on-the-floor, and hand-in-the-poo all over the shower cubicle. In fact, this could be a trend in my way of thinking… maybe I need to change that. No, I am bloody well almost sure I need to change how I think, although what I am unsure about is whether I really need to try so hard or whether it comes along with wrinkles and smile lines.

One thing she did make a point of was exactly what was bolded in the last paragraph. I find it far too easy to believe that if the human race sat on a couch and watched TV for thirty years they would “mature” and “grow”, at all. Of course no one’s saying that. But the important part of it all I guess is that experience doesn’t come with age, experience comes with bloody experience. If we don’t get out there and do things, we don’t get the experience, and having sat on the couch for thirty years, we would have knowledge about the most annoying commercial music, the number to SMS for Paris Hilton shits and giggles, who died in the car crash last week, and about everything else with about the clarity of smoke and mirrors and magic tricks.

So let’s talk about this some more. Y is a person who gets me thinking whenever I talk with her (ok, that’s twice now, but that doesn’t change the facts). Actually I’d talked with Y about this before I had received this email, very conveniently for this post. In fact, that particular conversation was the conception of my post on this blog about comfort zones previously. And then when I received this email, I thought, “I’ve got it. I really have got it. This person who I really respect and want to learn from has emailed me saying she AGREES with me! I’m learning! I know it, I know how to handle life, all the keys to all the doors are unlocked, I can go and get heaps of friends now, running out into the street naked and chanting ‘like me! like me!’ and everyone will LOVE ME!”

Sometimes it works for longer than other times. Sometimes I’ll wake up the next morning and think… what was I thinking??? I’m the same not old / not young fart who is can think of a thousand reasons why he is either mature / not mature and doesn’t know how to distinguish his thoughts in this way. For both Y and I (and if you ever read this Y I hope you don’t mind if I make an assumption on your part) there is a fundamental problem, and that is we are deceiving ourselves, or that’s how I see it anyway. No matter how much we might convince ourselves we are showing others what kind of person we are, we are cool, calm and collected, we are showing them who we are, who we want them to see us as; we will, in the end, be cheating ourselves of who we are, and furthermore, what we would have experienced if only we were more of ourselves. But is it possible to be this way if we are continually convinced we don’t have a personality, if we think, because of this problem called divorce, we don’t have a good self-identity? So it’s not possible, technically, to be myself. I won’t speak for you.

Ok I’m getting scared of pulling someone else into my own rambling dissertations now, so I’ll pull the plug.

As always, comments about the subject matter greatly desired (strange to express it now having never done so before but there you go).