Tuesday, September 03, 2019

Flotsam

Funny how you keep finding holdovers in your life from years ago - things, comments, and behaviors that once upon a time may have been cute or entertaining but now are at best neither cute nor entertaining and at worst, are liabilities.

Like most things, they undoubtedly served a purpose in your life once upon a time. Perhaps you used them to cope with something or they became "part" of your personality and your presentation.  Then, one day, out they come and suddenly they are revealed in all of their ugliness.

I am not talking about the sort of bad behaviors that should and are being condemned.  No, these are things that you think of as innocuous or amusing or part of who you are and how you view the world - comments that you think are clever (but are not clever by half) or personal mantras and mottoes which, while sounding awesome in your own mind, sound lame when spoken to someone else.

In other words, they now neither fit you and your station in life nor the time in which you live.

You might think I am being too hard on myself, and possibly I am.  I have this tendency to whipsaw from high to low several times in the same day (thanks, maniac-depressive behavior that still follows me around).  So on the one hand, I do not want to read too much into this.

Yet at this same time, I think it is always a fair question to be asking myself:  is what I am saying really communicating what I want to say and saying what I want about myself?  Or is it me dragging around flotsam from years gone past, things that perhaps only in my own mind continue to make sense and should be discontinued?

4 comments:

  1. Can’t help ya, TB. I became obsolete long ago. The world left me in the dust ages ago. But... You can sell your soul trying to conform to new trends and fashions that are essential to keeping up with the cool kids. Some people have and all I can do is wish them luck. I used to think that with difficult people, that if I only pitched myself right, that my logic and homework would do the rest. With some folks, they are going to believe what they believe for reasons that have nothing to do with you. I wasted way too much time on cases like that, the energy could have been spent on more productive things.

    I try to be upbeat and pleasant with people and shoot straight when I deal with people. It doesn’t always work.

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  2. ❤️❤️❤️🙏

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  3. Fair enough, Glen. There is a certain amount of being the way I am because I am right to be so, but some of it is being the way I am out of habit, which may not be the best way to be.

    Again, my overall plan remains the same: fade to gray. Then this becomes less of a problem.

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