Do you need a new personality?

life changing realizations

At the beginning of the year I was slumped in the passenger seat of my friend’s car in in the Best Buy parking lot at dusk, struggling to respond to a group text thread. I was tired and I was finding it incredibly difficult to type words. And in that moment I had an aha moment that has changed my life. I realized that whenever I respond to a text, I am, before anything else, thinking about mirroring the person I’m communicating with.

I’m subtly shifting my self in order to communicate in a way that I feel will be best received. So when there are multiple people in a thread, sometimes it scrambles my brain. I don’t know who to mirror. The second I realized this I said out loud to my friend I was with, “What the FUCK!? I need to get a fucking personality!”

Of course this is nuanced. Of course I have a personality. And, of course in some cases this skill is a good one to have. Buuuuuut, I realized that since I was very young, I orient towards others first, and then myself. So in that moment, I decided to flip it around. I am relearning how to figure out what I want and need first, and then respond to the needs and wants of others. This is hard, or at least weird and unfamiliar, when you have been doing the other forever. It’s particularly difficult to do gracefully. Of course this is not a unique experience. People I have spoken to about my revelation often say they have a similar orientation. They are often people who were socialized as girls and women.

It’s not that I didn’t know I was “other oriented.” It’s not like any of this was actually NEW information. But it was one of those moments where you feel it in your body. Where the data comes in a different form, through a different message, and you suddenly think, enough is enough.

What struck me as worth noting about this experience, was that I am generally “good at boundaries.” I can say no and I do so frequently. But what I missed was that I never felt like it was okay to say no; I said no and carried around guilt about it for decades (I’m not kidding). When someone wants something from me and I say “no I can’t do that”, I think it makes me bad. When I say I, I mean a very young part of me thinks that I am fundamentally bad if I don’t give you what you want (or, dangerously, what I perceive or project that you want). My witness self, or my adult self, prides myself on nuance, and understands that as silly, black and white thinking. But that doesn’t really matter to little Kate.

So, I’m just over here trying to disentangle and parse who I am from who I think others wanted me to be. Fun times!