Too Much Information...

Are you comfortable in your own skin? I'm not really, but then you probably already figured that out if you've been following my blog for any amount of time. I try to be comfortable in my skin, but then I invariably do something which is apparently socially unacceptable.

The thing about me is that on some deep level (okay, it ain't that deep!) I really enjoy saying whatever is on my mind and seeing how other people react. For some reason, most people don't seem comfortable with the level of honesty that I'm willing to convey. For instance, about a decade ago, while at a party, I was talking to a bunch of people I'd never met. I confessed that I had once dated a girl who wasn't really that into me purely based on the fact that I enjoyed giving her oral pleasure. The group went totally silent. I thought it was hilarious! I mean, they had been sharing stories about people they had dated, so I wanted to tell my own story. It seemed like the most amusing story I could tell at the time. Hell, I still think it's amusing!

And there was the time in General Psychology when the professor was discussing the mental and physiological processes involved in hunger. She mentioned how the pains of hunger go away and re-occur after a certain amount of time until you actually eat something. I chose to reveal, to an auditorium of at least one hundred students, that she wasn't correct. I then proceeded to recount my personal experience of starving myself as a form of personal punishment, when I was experiencing severe depression, and how the feeling of hunger would only return once or twice in the first twelve hours. Then I wouldn't feel any hunger again for at least three or four days, and once went a full seven before feeling anything. However, once I started to eat, my hunger hit me like a truck! Well, half the auditorium turned around and stared at me like I was crazy. Even the professor was flabbergasted for a moment. I was just sharing personal experience... I'm not sure why everyone was so freaked out by it. And in a psychology class, no less!

I wish I could feel comfortable being who I am, but it seems like a given that if I want to be socially proficient I have to be willing to wear a mask of some kind 99% of the time. I can't even be my true self around my friends or loved ones as evidenced by the people on Facebook who have threatened to de-friend me or have otherwise complained that my updates or comments have been a bit too revealing.

It's hard to tell the world to go fuck themselves when I feel such a desire to become socially connected with people. I don't want to have hundreds of friends, but I want five or six who really GET me and have fun with me while letting me be me. What good is being close with people if they don't see you for who you really are? And if you are only my friend so long as I hide behind a mask, what happens if and when the mask breaks?

Perhaps it is a fault in my logic to want everyone else to adapt to me rather than me adapting to everyone else. But I guess it speaks to how uncomfortable I am in my own skin. Maybe the mask has to be there as much for my own protection as for yours.

Have fun and keep living life... or some approximation thereof.