Poseur
Lately I’ve been on some rather random shit. Yesterday I wilded out on folks who don’t stand up when they come out of their faces. Really am hating that. It’s so bitch.
Tonight, or today, actually, I want to examine a poseurs: A man I know who walks around acting as if he has it all together when nothing could be further from the truth.
I’m the posuer. To hear me tell it, I have an answer, an intellectual nugget about everything. I’ve pondered this, contemplated that, dissected, distilled, synthesised … half the time I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. I have a gift for putting words together in a way that sounds interesting, intriguing even. But when I peel away the layers of bullshit, I’m left with a basic idea in most cases.
Sometimes I pose to fit in. I don’t like most people and yet I feel a strange need to be accepted by them. I promise that I have yet to make any sense of that. But to keep it really real … I haven’t tried. I’m laughing aloud, literally. But I really haven’t tried to make sense out of why I try to fit in with people whom, in most cases, I don’t give a rat’s ass about.
Some people will read this and wonder if they’re among those whom I don’t give a rat’s ass about, especially after I admitted in a previous blog that I can be phony along with the best of them.
Generally speaking, if I’m friendly towards a person –you know, making conversation, hanging out, speaking outside of when it’s absolutely necessary– I like them. But I’m not friendly towards many people precisely because I don’t like many people, so that solves that. I still can’t wrap my mind around the idea that I try to fit in despite knowing this. Maybe it’s socialisation. Maybe it’s not wanting to feel awkward or make others feel awkward. I’ve given it more thought here than I have at any time previously.
Whatever.
People think I’m happy and smart. I know how childish that sounds, to me anyway, but they do. I’m articulate, which people tend to associate with being smart. I’m no slouch but I’m not nearly as smart as I’d like to be, or as I think people perceive me to be.
I’m definitely not happy most of the time. That’s begun to change, in part because of how honest I’ve been with myself about me. But I’d like to actually be happy most of the time instead of acting as if I am most of the time. I think I have myself to blame for much of my unhappiness. I stop myself from doing things that would make me happy. I also put myself in situations that I know going in will make me unhappy. As with the fitting in thing, I don’t know what accounts for this, but unlike the fitting in thing, I have pondered it (really) and I actually care.
Maybe there’s a part of me that doesn’t believe that I deserve to be happy. There’s a difference between wanting to be happy and believing that I should be happy. The latter is where I believe I may be struggling. I haven’t done anything so terrible that should preclude me from being happy but I do have quite a bit of baggage I deal with from my childhood.
If ever I have children I will do everything I can, along with their mother, to make sure I love and nurture them, and contribute to their self-esteem. I hate to share the blame for my seemingly chronic melancholy with my parents but I can’t get around (or over) what happened to me. I’ve sought professional help, but it didn’t help. I don’t know how it could have. These people are supposed to sit and listen to me talk about the acute emotional abuse I endured as a child and help me do what, precisely? Feel better about what happened? Feel better about my parents? Feel better about me? The people I need to speak to are my parents. That will never happen. And so it is that I deal with the broken pieces from a torturously dysfunctional childhood the best way I can: unhappily.
But I can’t let on that I’m dealing with this, you see, so I feign normalcy and being functional. Now it seems I’m getting somewhere. Someone somewhere must know this about me or at least suspect as much. Perhaps a woman I’ve dated, or a woman I wanted to date. Maybe even a friend, or a fraternity Brother.
I enjoy hurting people because I hurt. I reason that the people I hurt have it coming. And those sons of bitches often do, but I could let it go. I don’t because I don’t want to hurt alone. That’s ironic that I’d seek the cosmic companionship of people I don’t like. According to the very logic I’ve employed here, it must be that I don’t like myself. That’s a painful reality to confront. There are things about myself that I like but that isn’t quite the same as liking myself.
I know I am not an inherently bad person. That’s a starting point. I don’t know who I would have become if I’d had different parents and a different childhood. Different isn’t necessarily tantamount to better. What I do know is who I am now and that I want to be happy. I want to like myself for the person I am, not the person I pretend to be, sometimes without giving it any thought. I want to stop posing.
I am going to stop posing. Now. That shouldn’t be taken to mean that I’m going to suddenly begin walking up and down the street singing hymns, smiling and waving. That also doesn’t mean that I’m going to give folks who cross me a pass. All it means is that I’m going to grow. I wasn’t there when I began writing this blog.
Some who read this will try to use what I’ve written against me. I may let it go or I may verbally undress them. Try me and find out. Maybe, though, some who read this will be prompted to look at themselves in an honest light. I feel better now that I have done so.