Attic Tales

According to Katherine Fugate, whom I wish to be my future wife, we all do what we need to do in order to survive. If you need to play the victim, you play the victim. If you need to play the hero, you play the hero. We all play the roles we need to so we can get out of bed in the morning and face the world…except on Mondays. On Mondays, the world is unfaceable. It’s a word, and you can use it.

Here’s a mostly harmless anecdote for you: A few weeks ago, I was invited to a housewarming party by a delightfully quirky gal who barely knows me yet was kind and crazy enough to let me know where she lives. To make a long story short, I ended up making an ass of myself by giving unsolicited advice to a harmless guest who had no idea she was venting to someone who is as much a psychologist as George Constanza is an architect. I won’t blame the hostess if she never invites me back to one of her parties.

Being the over-processor that I can be, I agonized for hours afterwards about my actions. Who was I, a total stranger, to divulge hardcore reality checks to someone I suspect merely wanted to voice her frustrations without the psychoanalysis wrap-up? Despite the fact that I know what I was saying was true, maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. Not everyone is ready to face the truth about themselves. It can make us feel incredibly vulnerable and emotionally raw. Not to mention that it can make us cry, and who the hell likes to do that?

We all have some good, bad, and ugly inside of us. Sometimes we’re willing to face the unpleasant truths about ourselves in a head-on collision, sometimes we just don’t care, and other times, we’re willing to go into complete denial and pretend there’s nothing wrong with us at all. Again, it’s a question of survival…and if we’re PMSing.

However, what happens when these survival techniques don’t work for us anymore? For almost 2 years I’ve been trying very hard to stop playing the role of the EMO HERO. It worked for me in the past for various reasons: I needed to be needed, I felt validated by being helpful, I truly felt I had all the tools necessary to save the people in my life, I didn’t want to deal with my own emotional baggage, etc. It’s taken me a longtime to realize that the only person I’m emotionally responsible for is ME.

I think the reason I felt really bad about what happened at the party was because I felt like I was regressing. I was investing my time, my energy, and my emotions into helping someone who clearly wasn’t ready to make any kind of substantial changes in her life. And more importantly, hadn’t even asked for my help in the first place. So why was I repeating these same survival techniques that no longer help me survive?

The answer is simple. Well not that simple since it took me a few weeks to figure out. I was honest with her because it was the decent thing to do. Honesty and decency help me get up in the morning. Those aren’t just traits that help me to survive, they help me to live.

Living for me is being true to myself and truthful to others in the hopes they will be true to themselves as well. We all do what we need to survive. I respect that. But I don’t just want to survive, I want to LIVE…even on Mondays.