Choose your perspective

You and I were once the same.

In many ways, you and I are still the same, but are absorbed with contradictory personalities and perceptions of the world. We all have our own views, our own values, and our own scales of magnitude with how much something means or doesn’t mean to us.

Dr. Sean Carrol wrote, “all lives are different and some face hardships that others may never know, but we all share the same universe, the same walls of nature, and the same fundamental task of creating meaning and of mattering for ourselves and those around us in this brief amount of time that we have on this world.” What does this mean to you? To me, it means that there is no right way to view the world. Sure, there are harmful, sometimes damaging perspectives of the world that can lead to utter hatred and in some catastrophic scenario, even substance abuse to cope with the view you’ve created for yourself, but is this wrong? As a behaviorist, I feel that people make their own decisions based off their own perceived consequences. We know what could happen, so we make the best choice in response to that. This is true for your view of the world, procrastinating a major assignment, or choosing green chile over red.

As an introvert, like many of you who I’m assuming share this trait with me if you’re reading this shit in the first place, I find myself thinking all too often. Sometimes I think about shit that doesn’t matter – why did I eat the corndog instead of the pizza that Tuesday in 4^th grade? During my nonstop thinking, I’ve lately been pondering the possible ingredients to peace. Peace in individuality, life, and fuck it, even the world. What I feel a lot of it comes down to, is staying in your own damn lane. Like Dr. Carrol wrote, “some face hardships that others may never know.” This doesn’t mean that your hardships are any less than any other person’s, but it also doesn’t give us the right to resort to grandiosity in thinking our hardships are the hardest of the hard.

The world can be shit…complete, bonafide, major league shit. But what can be more shit is our perspective of the world and what it does to us. At that point, we’re allowing that to happen to us and the world wins.

Care for yourselves, the people you love and those who love you, be the person who smiles and not the one who doesn’t smile back, and stay in your damn lane, folks.

What’s the issue?

When creating this blog, I asked myself over and over, “what is the issue?” Why do I feel the need to go out of my way and out of my comfort zone to create some blog for people to read. What is it that I have to say? I am no philosopher or motivational speaker. I am someone who is about to become a father for the first time and I am scared shitless because of the world my child will be brought into. When I was younger, there were bullies in school and we all had to deal with them. Ya know, the cool kids who liked to laugh at the special education students and bothered another person simply because they had a different ,unusual trait that an asshole kid thought was worthy of glorifying simply to make themselves feel better. My quiet self was attacked on several occasions because I didn’t talk and often would ignore those who were trying to be cool by bullying me (not because I was strong, but because I would rather continue minding my own fucking business than to respond to them). Not to mention, as a teenager I was fat and my name is Albert so that didn’t help me any one bit.

As I grew older I learned more and more that if someone wants to be an asshole, there is no stopping them. People do it because they want to be cool and because they receive reinforcement when it is committed. The issue is that we are doing things simply to receive the reinforcement of our peers in the form of essential high fives and and a pat on the ass. Now, whatever it takes to receive that reinforcement is the issue. We disregard who we truly are because perhaps, we are afraid of what the others might think of our real selves. The cool kids are wearing expensive shoes and nice clothes, so I need to do that too; disregarding the fact that I am more comfortable in my aged Converse and faded t-shirt that was given to me as a gift three years ago and now sports a pizza stain. I remember when I was about twelve years old, I was skateboarding a lot with my friends. I had a cheap skateboard from K-Mart. It was a “Nash” and it sucked which was something the crowd liked to remind me of on a regular basis. I didn’t appreciate it so much because my friends all had pro decks and shoes and I came from a single mother so we didn’t have much. One day, my mom told me she was taking me to buy new shoes and a skateboard, which immediately was a surprise given our lifestyle at the time. Anyway, on that day she bought me a pair of Globe skate shoes and an Element skateboard. I was so excited because I finally had something that all the cool kids had. The next time my friends and I met to skate was the first time I learned what was to be a life-long lesson. I showed them my new shoes and skateboard, similar to what they all had and to my utter surprise, nobody. fucking. cared. WHAT!?

I think about this event often in my adult life and the reason it has resonated so much with me is that I cared more about fitting in; about gaining the acceptance of my peers than I did about accepting my own position in life or appreciating my mother for buying me these things in the first place. The reason I wanted something new was because it was deemed “cool” by the group I was around. That the inanimate objects were cool and therefor, the people who possessed them should be cool as well. I didn’t have them so I wasn’t cool. Or so I thought. I realized that now that I had the same things that others did, I was no more “cool” than I was prior to having them. I morphed from someone of difference to now being someone of the same. So, what about the quiet people? What about the people who experience depression here and there or maybe the ones who walk differently, who don’t talk the same as the majority, or can’t afford new clothes? What often happens is that people will try to enhance the areas that they think people want to see more of. The quiet guy wants to be more outgoing so, Tequila makes him do that (guilty). The depressed one wants to be more content and feel better about themselves so they push others down to achieve this.

Now, apply this lesson to kids today. With the growth of social media, bullying continues to grow and as does its severity and impact. Not only in person, but online as well and it sucks. I will save this section of this post for another entry, but I end with this; the issue is not that people are being jerks. The issue is that people will do whatever it is they need to do to gain acceptance from their peers even if it means they be an asshole to someone because they are quiet, have a faded shirt, gay, or bigger around the waist.

While in the latter half of my twenties, people are still bringing attention to areas they see as weak, such as remaining silent. Socializing in the group is expected so its absence is unusual, “let’s tell him he doesn’t talk!” They can’t see my thoughts or my appreciation of their unique accent, vocabulary or otherwise. They don’t know that maybe I have a lot to say, but choose not to. I now accept myself for the person I am and am proud of myself for the person I have become given the challenges I have been faced. Being an introvert is my unusual trait and it is what I have battled throughout my life. I have mastered the skill of adapting to the group I am in to where people may not realize that I am uncomfortable. You aren’t cool because of the clothes you’re wearing or the way you do your makeup. Nobody cares about how much money you make or the car you drive and if they do, then you need to get the hell out. You’re cool because you’re not an asshole. That’s why people like you and can stand to be around you for any amount of time.

 

The Loudest Thinker in the Room is created to help people realize the simple things that we do to gain acceptance from our peers on a daily basis (myself included). We all have differences and they shouldn’t matter. What I feel matters the most is how you treat those who come into your presence.

I try living my life every day by a lesson that a good friend of mine, Mark used to say before he passed away. He said, “you always want to make sure that you leave people wanting more. If they don’t want more, that means they’ve had enough.” That and he always reminded me to keep a spare pair of underwear near by just in case.

The Loudest Thinker In The Room

I have always been a quiet person who often sits at the farthest, most isolated table at the coffee shop or stands silently around a group of people as they laugh with one another and make jokes. With this, I am constantly told that I am a quiet person, “why don’t you talk” or “are you mad?” It isn’t that I necessarily have social anxiety or am I mad, depressed, or any of these other suggestions. In reality, I am just an introverted person who enjoys analyzing the group I am around, thinking of responses I could say in that group, or making jokes inside my own head (a lot of times, they are fucking funny jokes too). In all seriousness, it is a rather difficult personality to live with. Well, maybe more bitter sweet. I love being on my own. As I type this, I am that person sitting at the furthest table of the coffee shop, happily, watching people laugh and smoke their cigarettes who seem to be having an awesome time. I make eye contact with some individuals who happen to look in my direction and see me sitting alone and I wonder what they are thinking. “Oh, how sad that guy is by himself.” In reality, I may be happier than they are.

The purpose of this blog is to help people with similar personalities. Not necessarily to overcome this type of personality, but more to accept it and realize that many of us live similar lives, but often adapt to the current environment so we don’t feel left out or to prevent people from thinking we are rude. There are many books out there about introverts versus extroverts and similar studies, but not very many reflections of the lifestyle itself.

I want to help because I have seen many, many people who have similar personalities and would much rather be alone with their own thoughts, but as this is usually not accepted by social groups, they begin using drugs and alcohol to try “making” themselves more social (I get it, I have drank so I could be more “fun” many times before). I think that is bullshit. I think that having a quiet person in a group of loud asses creates a balance and it has taken me a long time to accept that the quiet person is me. Bear with me, please, as this blog is the stepping stone to what could be a helpful tool to someone. I don’t aspire to be some popular writer who helps millions of people. No, it is more important that I get some paltry amount of awareness and relation out there because the world is full of people who feel the need to be fake about themselves.  I recently was at work and a bunch of nurses, doctors, and techs were laughing with each other and one nurse looked over to me who was naturally sitting away from the group and said, “what’s wrong, you don’t have anything to say?” I know this was an invite to the conversation,  which indeed was polite, but I just wasn’t interested. It was at this moment that I realized that my sitting alone quietly, not talking does not mean that I have nothing to say.

So, here we are.