Here's last week's planner usage:
I've always thought of myself as a positive person, but I think it's more that I'm constantly plagued by negative thoughts, which I then positive-talk myself out of. So I'm all 'Wow, I'm such a positive person, I always try to make the most of bad things!' when... a large number of the bad things are absolutely spawned by my own head to start with. I get the impression not everyone is constantly fighting a cavalcade of 'you are going to fail, you are tolerated by others at best, your skills are puny and your mental capacity is declining daily' thoughts continuously as they go about their day.
Or am I wrong? Are we all scared, all the time, and it's just some people say their lived experience is different? I just don't know.
I say this because on Sunday I finished reading Elanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland (adored it, and Coupland's writing really can't be described without throwing in the word 'craftmanship') and the protagonist was a very relatable woman whose way of thinking made me reflect on my own quite a lot. And my self-image as a "positive" person.
Positive thinking is a skill I have learned to manage the negative thinking, which is something so innate to me I don't even see it half the time.
I say it's innate, but was I born like that? I don't think so. But the negative thinking was embedded early and young for a variety of reasons, and while I can manage it, I do think it will be a part of me forever, at this point. I'm too old now to heal those places. They're too deep, now. A splinter that melded with my bones.
And that's okay. We don't need to cure everything ailing us to still be capable of doing what we want to do with our lives. It's okay sometimes just to simply get by on some counts.
Today someone has contacted me about potential work they'd like me to do, which is great timing as I've almost completed my current big piece of work. And my immediate reaction inside my head was "That's great - oh no, they're local, they're going to meet me to discuss the project and then immediately pull out when they see how uncharismatic I am in real life compared to the way I present online. It won't matter how good my portfolio is or how suitable I am in terms of skill. I'm doomed. As soon as they see me they'll want to run. My LinkedIn profile picture is the only time I've looked attractive in the last three years."
You might scoff at this, but as a woman, I've experienced my own looks working both against and for me in a variety of situations. My fear of being judged for my looks is something I learned, not something I was born with. And when a man is offering you a job, there's two fears: you don't want him to think you're attractive, because he might treat you worse for it. And you don't want him to think you're ugly, for the exact same reason.The perfect world is one in which he thinks you are perfectly, unremarkably average, neither offensive to the eye or desirable.
If you're a man reading this, or a woman who feels men have never treated her differently for how she looks: please just trust that this is my experience. If you aren't reading this pile of journal-ish self-analysis with the assumption that I'm recording what's is true for my lived experience as, well, me, then, you're kind of wasting your time. This is not intended as some kind of PA-attack on all men, I'm just saying that this is something I've learned to be as careful about as possible, in order to avoid bad consequences with _some_ men. And when meeting a man you don't know, it's something you have to consider extra carefully if you're like me.
Still. While the risk is worth minimising through actions (dress as well as possible to present yourself as capable, though be sure to look a little frumpy, but in a put-together way.) I know my thinking is also on the extreme catastrophic end of things - even if it's worth being careful, there's no need to assume this piece of good luck will actually end in disaster. And even if this person finds my face ugly, they might still be happy to hire me. And even if, conversely, they find me attractive, they might be the kind of guy who isn't a jerk about that.
There's no point to all this writing, as usual. Just venting what's on my mind. And I definitely recommend reading Elanor Rigby. Though if you don't like a tough of the surreal mixed into your literary fiction, you might not like Coupland's work. But if you're like me, that kind of thing is a bonus!
