chasing the sun

The best time for you to hold your tongue is the time you feel you must say something or bust. –“Josh Billings” (aka. Henry Wheeler Shaw)


I’d like to preface the following by saying that I am a verbal processor. When things happen to me or around me, as I learn and experience new and different things, I feel a strong need to talk about them or else I feel I never really resolve the issues in my head. Needless to say I have great difficulty keeping my big mouth shut…

Anyway, in the past few days I have come face to face with some interesting truths about myself:

1) When I don’t get enough to eat or enough sleep I should not be around other people. I feel sorry for my roommates and coworkers who have had to endure the brunt of my low blood sugar rages and my sleep-deprived crankiness.

2) I am not as self-aware as I would like to think I am. In fact, I can be hugely hypocritical and I often misspeak and repeat things that might not actually be true, even going so far as to defend them when pressed rather than admitting I’m full of it. Are we sure I shouldn’t be a lawyer??

3) I have immense problems yielding when I think I am right. I always knew I was stubborn, but the way I’ve been acting lately shows a complete inability on my part to back down from sometimes pointless and, in the end, meaningless arguments. Why can’t I just say, “Whatever! In the end, what we’re arguing about doesn’t even matter and if you want to be right, go ahead, even at my expense!”?

4) I am not a good encourager. I can easily point out bad and/or negative things people do and even try to stop them from making egregious mistakes like making their chocolate chip cookies too chocolate-chippy or not keeping track of their expenditures in a physical check register…But it is really difficult for me to see someone doing something that they, by all accounts, should be doing and then praise them for it. Yet most people I’ve talked to about this have said that praise, encouragement and compliments are necessary. It’s possible that I just don’t ever audibly appreciate the good qualities in others, at least not to their faces. I might tell other people what I like about them, but I think I am very unlikely to say it directly to them. I still don’t know why that is.


All of this reflection leaves me quite uneasy. I feel like I don’t have anywhere to go with it all and its just swimming around in my over-active brain. It’s really hard to live in the moment, in the midst of change, knowing that the transition is and will continue to be painful. I want to run and escape and I am suffering from huge withdrawals without my iPod.

Not much is making sense right now, except the bad things...