On Being Shy

I remember the first time I was aware of the fact that I was blushing. Junior year of high school, I was the defense attorney for Daisy Buchanan in a mock trial we put on after reading The Great Gatsby. 

I’m a writer. All this means is that I am far, far more comfortable expressing myself and getting my point across through words than I am through speech. Our roles were assigned by slips of paper we picked out from a bowl, so my being the defense counsel did not come about through some great oversight on my teacher’s part, it’s just the way it happened. I was doing wonderfully, asking the right questions, getting the correct answers, but I got confused asking Daisy something. I have no idea what the question was, but I paused to make sure I wasn’t ruining my argument…and I could not for the life of me get my mind to continue working. I lost my train of thought, and I stood there, staring down at my paper, willing my mind to restart. It didn’t, and I became very uncomfortably aware of the meaning of two phrases: ‘sweating in panic’, and ‘turning red.’ 

Amazingly, as shy as I was and/or am, I’d never experienced either of those emotions before. The more time went by the more panicked I became and the less my mind would cooperate. I broke out sweating and turned bright, bright red. 

I thought I had outgrown my shyness in the years since school and the early (who am I kidding? mid-late!) years of college, but it’s still there, hidden underneath, and it comes out more and more often now. I may not want to make my career being a teacher, but it has done for me and my confidence what nothing else could have. 

I was breaking out of my shell midway through college, and even in the early years of college with some groups, mainly people I met in class, but I really and truly am confident now of who I am in social gatherings. Alhamdulillah. I’m shy, but I have a lot of really interesting things to share and I enjoy sharing them. Family, immediate and extended, sit and stare at who I turn out to be in social gatherings. 

Anyways, my point is that even underneath all that, I’m still very shy and I find myself blushing more and more now. I’m brown, so half the time the person I’m talking to won’t even notice that I’m embarassed, self conscious, or uncomfortable. This is positive in some ways, but I wish my blushing was more apparent, at least then they’d be able to understand why I’m suddenly quiet and don’t have an immediate response to give them.

Someone I know started talking to me about marriage the other day and whether I was interested in anyone. An uncomfortable subject to begin with, but then he began mentioning mutual friends, asking if I would be interested in any of them. Supremely embarassed, bright red underneath my brown skin, I gave a handful of non-commital answers and tried to end the conversation. He took that as me not being serious. 

First of all, I’m not going to tell you if I’m interested in a mutual friend. Second of all, this was completely and totally out of the blue; I wasn’t prepared and I honestly don’t know what answer I could give to “are you interested in person x” if person x is your friend even if I had been prepared.

I’m shy. I can’t do much about that. I’ve done pretty much everything I could; I am now not-shy on the surface, but that’s as far as it’s going to go because I am a naturally shy person. Shyness is a virtue and I’m not going to apologize for who I am. But don’t take this trait of mine and use it to your advantage. Don’t misunderstand when I don’t answer or when I avoid eye-contact. I’m shy. I get very uncomfortable when someone pays me a compliment and I’ve honestly never learned how to accept one. Don’t take that as rudeness, please. And don’t bring up uncomfortable topics and think I’m not taking my life seriously if I give you short answers. I  am interested in someone. He lives in Austin, and the way I know him is almost comical: I don’t. Not really. I met him once and I would like to get to know him better but I don’t know how. 

At social gatherings, it’s always the other girls who get asked for their numbers, not me, because I’m shy. I don’t know how to approach you if I’m attracted to you, I’m shy. Is that making sense? 

Why would I tell you that I’m interested in this person? I don’t know him. I know how ludicrous it would sound. I would sound like I’m 13. But I’m not, I’m just shy.

So, yes, I do want to get married eventually, insha’Allah. I just don’t want to discuss it with you. 

Liege and Lief

I keep discovering how alike everyone is. I know it’s a cliche, but the more I see it the less depressed I get. I’m not actually depressed, alhamdulillah I’m happy most of the time, but I am in this weird place in life where I’m not sure what I’m feeling half the time. Am I sad? Confused? Apathetic? Sympathetic to the state of the everyone’s (including my own) lives? 

So I keep discovering how alike everyone is, especially regardless of skin color and ethnicity. And the more I live my life in this weird feeling state, the more I think, “we’re all so alike, in fact, that they make sitcoms about situations exactly like ours” ‘Ours’, because I’m exactly the same as my white neighbors and my black neighbors and my Asian neighbors and my mixed race neighbors. Family is always, always the same. There are but a few different families in the world, and they all repeat themselves in each of the millions of families in the world. If you’re blessed enough to have both parents living together happily, the problems you have with them are the same problems the family down the street has who doesn’t share your skin color, your religion, your culture, or your language. If you have a single parent, you have the same problems that your other completely-different-from-you-neighbor-with-one-parent has. And on and on. 

Ellen DeGeneres has an hour long stand up routine called Here and Now: Modern Life and Other Inconveniences. In it she talks about the trouble we have opening CD’s, getting the brand new roll of toilet paper to start, having someone accidentally spit on you while you’re talking to them, receiving insults disguised as compliments, and the ‘universal sign that you’re irritated’. It’s hilarious. But it’s hilarious because we can all relate to most of it in the end. 

So, to quote the album I’m currently listening to, I’m loyal and ready to be a part of it. 

Jesus died, but now he lives. In Detroit. Sort of.

Reblogged from 23thorns:

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I was very young when my father discovered Jesus. He was walking around his garden, as was his wont, when he heard Jesus next door. He popped his head over the wall to ask the neighbour who he was listening to, and from that day forth, Jesus became part of our lives.

We knew his every word before we had seen out our first decade.

Read more… 2,833 more words, 1 more video

Incredible.

Wasting Life

Here’s how you know Warm Bodies is going to be good just by watching the trailer, even though it has Zombies and is therefore weird: it features music by Broken Bells. It’s a no brainer (pun intended), Warm Bodies has to be good.

I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I just sit here all day long, every day, and do nothing. I watch TV, I go on the internet, and I just sit. I’ve come to an impasse that I do not know how to pass. Because, just because. There’s nothing in the world I want to do that is worth doing. That is a Very Big Problem. I’ve been through it again and again and again and again and again, and there’s nothing there. Not a single thing that is worth my time. So, instead, with the wonderful logic that my life is full of, I sit here and do nothing. Because what better way to spend your time than to waste it. It’s better than wasting it actually doing something. I might as well waste it by not doing anything. What? 

I don’t know how to move on from here. I don’t enjoy reading anymore. I mean, actually, I don’t know if I enjoy reading anymore or not because I have absolutely no desire to read. What on Earth am I supposed to do with that? I can’t remember ever in my entire life not having the desire to read. I’m sure I had the desire to read even when I didn’t know how to read, I just couldn’t follow through with that desire. 

I have no desire to read, I have no desire to do anything. Except sit here on the couch in the exact same place every single day from the moment I get up till the moment I have to to go sleep and watch TV or go on the internet to…do nothing. 

My life is so pointless I don’t even know how to fix it. I want to move toward a larger goal but I can’t…because there’s nothing to move toward. It’s like every thing in the world reaches back to that point. 

I don’t even have the desire to explain myself more fully so that you might actually understand what I’m saying. I just don’t know what to do. 

I love using my head, but there’s nothing to be gained from that so why do it? I would love to go to school, but what’s the point? What am I accomplishing by reading some book on political theory and then writing a paper on it? I would love to read that book and write that paper, but what have I accomplished by doing that? Have I saved a life? Have I made an actual difference in anything, for anyone? I don’t even like work. I hate work. Unless it involves reading a book on political theory and writing a paper on it. Actual work, the kind that’s called a job that you get paid for doing, I don’t like it. I don’t want to do it. Unless it involves reading a book on political theory and writing a paper on it. But that’s useless. It’s a waste of time. What am I going to do with that paper once I finish it? Absolutely nothing. 

Even if I were to humor whoever is responding to this and say that it could get published, so what? What does it matter if it gets published? Who’s going to read it? Either someone who agrees with it, nods along the entire time they’re reading it, then puts it off to the side, or someone who disagrees with it, writes a rebuttal, and then gets that published. Big frikkin whoop. What is that accomplishing??? I could go back and forth with Jean Locke 5,000 times and it wouldn’t accomplish a darn thing. 

So there’s nothing in the world worth doing. I would like to get a PhD, but that’s a big waste of my life. None of the jobs in the world in my field are worth doing. What am I supposed to do with that? 

Wordless Emotions

“We Will Become Silhouettes” by the Postal Service:

I’ve got a cupboard with cans of food,
Filtered water, and pictures of you.
And I’m not coming out until this is all over.

And I’m looking through the glass,
Where the light bends at the cracks.
And I’m screaming at the top of my lungs,
Pretending the echoes belong to someone I used to know.

I don’t have a someone I would think this about. But the intensity of the emotions in the song stayed with me, and I was able to sort of put into words what I’ve been wanting to write about for a long time. The beginning is slightly plagiarized, but it becomes my own after a couple of lines. If I knew how to create music, I would set this to music and the result would be much more powerful. As it is, I read the beginning to the beat of “We Will Become Silhouettes” anyway.

 

I’ve got beats running through my mind,
Wordless emotions swirling around.
I’ve listened and I’ve heard,
I’ve yelled and I’ve absorbed,
And when nothing seems to end,
When it piles on and on and on,
I let it build it up and build up and build up,
Compressed to absolute zero where words cannot exist.

You forced me to lose myself,
To arrive where words cannot exist.
Meaning is pre-eruption.
Post condension, post compression.

Voices lost and never heard.
In the family rooms and tv rooms, abandoned and left to roam.
Pushed away by fear and stress,
Kicked away by depression.

When they come floating back, the time’s come and gone.
When they never return, it doesn’t matter anyway.

(This is why I blast music in the car.)

Music as Genre-less

I am so defined by my music now. I say ‘my music’ because it very much is so. I can listen to a song I’ve never heard before and it will instantaneously become mine, or it won’t. I can listen to a beat I’ve never heard before and it will create a new ‘memory’ in my mind of how much I have always liked the beat. 

Maybe that’s just the nature of the art. If am defined by a particular genre, then, by definition, all music in that genre will have some element that links them all together, that makes them unique in some way. 

Maybe. So here I am at nearly 3 o’clock in the morning, listening to Give Up by The Postal Service. And I listen to “We Will Become Silhouettes” performed by The Shins and marvel at how they took this song that is the singer from Death Cab at such a basic level and turned it into…The Shins. You listen to the song and you know that it’s them, no question about it. Then you listen to “Such Great Heights” performed by Iron and Wine and you wonder how songs, the exact same songs, can change so much just by who’s singing them. The lyrics are the same, the melody is the same, the beats are the same. So how can Iron and Wine turn a Postal Service song into an Iron and Wine song by changing nothing?

It’s incredible. So maybe there really aren’t any genres. Maybe all genres are one and each song is defined by each singer, not by its lyrics, nor by its melody, nor by its beat. Could Bono take a jazz song and turn it into something that is U2 at its core? Could Chris Martin take a folk piece and turn it into something that is Coldplay at its most fundamental level?

At the end of the day, are we just listening to the deepest most visceral emotions of each singer and not a song from a specific genre since there are no genres? That must be why music becomes a part of me or repels me so immediately. The songs are so base in their emotions that my emotions either completely connect with them or are completely turned off by them. Kind of like they are with people, movies, ideas, books, and thoughts; like they should be if life is to be worth living. 

So, can James Mercer not become Death Cab for Cutie if he had to? 

Staying In The Game

                                 

 

“I try to make a move just to stay in the game,” Tom Chaplin of Keane sings. “I try to stay awake and remember my name.”

I feel as if I’m struggling just to keep my head above the water. It’s a swimming race and I’m so far behind I barely count as part of the race. And that’s with all my effort. I’d be on the shore far behind if I wasn’t struggling and kicking and constantly punching the water to try and stay afloat and move a minuscule amount forward. And then, at the end of the day or week or month I’m exhausted and tired out and I think, well, at least I’ve moved forward, but then I look down and I realize that not only have I not moved forward, all my struggling has actually pushed me back a foot. 

And I don’t know if I have the energy to keep going. Sometimes the discouragement from going backwards when you’re giving it your all can keep you from ever getting anywhere. Sometimes. 

“Just stay in the ring for three rounds,” the main character on Little Mosque on the Prairie tells the Imam, “just keep evading your opponent, stay in the ring, and we’ll call it a win.” We’ll call it a win if I can just keep going. That’s all I have to do; keep at it, keep fighting, and stay in the game. The mental fight against the discouragement is the fight at this point. That is the game. If I can win against that, then I’ll have won, insha’Allah. 

Maybe what counts at this point is not the public race but my own race against myself. Maybe I should stop for a bit; stay in place and just stay afloat. Not letting myself drown, even if I’m not moving forward, is a win in itself I should think. Maybe allowing myself the time and not piling on the mental anguish of not moving forward will help me relax enough that I will be able to move forward again. Maybe. Insha’Allah.