Who, me? Couldn't be!

I realize (and have realized for a while) that my blog provides very few, er, rather no details on what it is im actually doing here. Some people might read and say, “wait, what, Paige was there??” And others may ask if I’m even, like, working anymore? Since many have pointed out the annoyance of this, maybe it wouldn’t hurt for me to stop unintentionally keeping you in the dark.

I left FED over 3 weeks ago to meet my sister in Bangkok, with whom I traveled for 2 weeks. After she left I spent some time in Chiang Mai by myself before meeting up with Danielle, who I then joined for a “honeymoon” in Koh Samui. I learned a lot from these few weeks spent living out of my backpack. From how to travel with others to how to keep your cool in the face of obnoxious tuk-tuk drivers, many lessons were learned and I hope I can somehow share them in all their glory and exigencies in the next few blog posts.

Now I am staying with Sandra (ever the gracious host; she has honestly gone above and beyond to help me out, but more on that later) for a week while I look for a place to rent a room until I leave FED and head home. I have had trouble sorting through my feelings about when I am going home, but showering post-jog on the beach I realized that if I’ve made “when I run out of shampoo” a reason to go home sooner rather than later then maybe there are actually some reasons deeper than lather to which I should give my attention.

In only one day back at FED it’s grown clearer to me that, regardless of what’s going on at FED, at home, etc. I would benefit most from listening to what I want to do. This aspect of listening to myself is actually much more difficult than I would like to think and I have a much harder time parsing what I want from what “others want” than I wish I did, but one thing that I constantly need to remind myself of is this: you won’t please others by doing what you think they want. Generally speaking, they like you better when you’re yourself anyway.

OK, cool. Just be myself. Oh wait, who dat be? Hm, well, I actually don’t know. I think I am probably someone in between who I think I am and who others think I am.

After reading a review of psychologist James Pennebaker’s new book about what our use of pronouns can say about us I took one of the quizzes on his website. Upon completion of the quiz I learned that I had used more than double the average number of self-referential terms for that given picture. His studies have correlated the use of self-referential pronouns (I, me, and the like) to higher levels of insecurity. Oh. Grand. I could make up excuses about how I messed up, leading to a higher number of ‘I’s than I would have put otherwise (well, I did), but I could also take this finding not only with a grain of salt, but also as a bit of a wake-up call as well. ‘I’ is scattered copiously throughout this paragraph, and while it is a blog post, there still is something to be learned from that. Perhaps I am more self-centered and less confident than I would like to believe. Perhaps it’s possible that not all people with gaping insecurities are actually aware of these insecurities.

How I perceive myself and how I act are actually two very different things (and both are different from how others see me), and I could benefit from stepping back and trying to look at myself from the outside. This involves being honest with myself, something I didn’t even realize I wasn’t fully being. How to be that kind of honest is still foreign to me, but like all things, it will become clearer with time as long as I am putting in the effort to understand it.

While traveling I started many blog posts, and many interesting thoughts have appeared. Too many were lost to distractions, too little time at the moment, and the passage of time overall. However one particular thought that keeps recurring is my view on honesty, and questions I have about what it means to be honest. Most recently I have been obsessed with this idea of honesty, not the self-reflective kind I mentioned above—but about how honesty (and the lack thereof) plays out in social settings. Tune in next time for: the thousand ways Alyssa’s been duped!