I posted this on my secret dear-alan blog, but after sitting on it a few days I realized that it will be of no use when you read this ten years from now. So I decided to repost it here where you will undoubtabley not check for a long, long time.
I bet you’ve wondered why I’m so interested in personality tests. My theory is this: that the more confident you are in your personality, the less you care about those damn tests. Because they’re simply there to reaffirm what you already know. Then there’s people like me…who struggle with those tests and take them over and over again, ever hopeful to unlock another secret part of my identity stashed away in my subconscious. You could say that I’m “uncomfortable” with my personality, but that’s not entirely it either. To be more accurate, I would say that I simply cannot bridge the disparity between different facets of myself. Many of those personality tests are black and white, with a disclaimer “you can be something in between.” But let’s be real: you’re either extroverted or introverted. Sensing or intuitive. Thinking or feeling. Judging or perceiving. You get your four letters and you have to live with it, no one cares how much more E you are than I, more S than N, etc etc etc… Cognitively, I realize that this is a scale created by another human being and therefore is not absolute. But it’s interesting that on all tests, Jungian and others, I’ve always been extroverted. I feel introverted. I act extroverted. It’s really quite a creative tension, particularly for someone who wants to be the truest form of herself.
I never set out to be the truest form of myself. I knew from an early age how to get what I want. I’m good at manipulating people—reverse psychology, guilt-tripping, turning the tables—that’s my specialty. After the awful break up with Chris though, I realized that I needed to make some huge changes in my life. If the only way I let men into my life and my heart was to keep them at an arm’s length through some twisted emotional bondage that led to a slave-master relationship (sorry Chris, K, D, and T...you know who I'm referring to), I was going to keep digging myself deeper into these unfulfilling relationships that were leading nowhere. So after I had my period of mourning and helplessness and utter despair post-breakup, I did what I do best: make lists, blog religiously, plan, plan, and plan. This is where I overhauled my life. I started my wellness regime, went back to church (this time out of faith rather than habit), and made many decisions about my future. I decided that I would be 100% transparent in my next relationship—the good, the bad, the ugly. If that scared away the guy…whatever. I would find a guy that could handle it all. Of course I thought I would have at least a year to get my affairs in order and slowly make the switch to total transparency…but you interrupted those plans as fast as I made them.
Post-break up and pre-Alan, I kept many diaries. I had a lot of thoughts…I’ve always been a thinker, to the point where I couldn’t be alone with my thoughts and preferred to drown them out with music…but I decided to attempt embracing the silence and addressing all of my thoughts. I thought a lot that summer. I meditated as I ran, I blogged using voice-memos as I commuted, I took videos of my thoughts. My biggest fear was that transparency would twist and warp my actions into negative things, and that I would appear (not become) someone I was not. I was afraid that openness would be interpreted as naivete, love as neediness, commitment as obsession, feelings as overly emotional. My biggest fear was confirmed last week when you did exactly that.
I am strong, fiercely independent, demanding, wildly ambitious, in-control all the time, and the total head-over-heart and knows-what-she-wants type. I despise people who are needy, dependent, weak-willed, wishy-washy, “feelings” type of people. Yet my promise to myself to let myself process all my thoughts, handle all my emotions in their full capacity led you to make me out to be the type of person that I hate. I was crushed. During that “incident,” all I could feel was a flashback to a summer ago, practically to the day, where I decided that I was going to put it all out there—the feelings, the emotions, the love, the pain, the creative tension- ALL OF IT. I had made so much progress destroying the mental walls of self-preservation and confiding in you. In the aftermath of your destructive rant, I could feel those mental walls erecting themselves, crushing all progress I had made. I wish you had met me before last August. You would understand what a different, reserved, nothing-but-business person I was.
As you sat there apologizing for an hour, I was still. I didn’t know what to say or do. I could only process half of the highway of thoughts in my mind. I sat there torn between two paths. I could shut down, mortally wounded by your attack on the weakest part of my heart, or I could knock down those walls of self-preservation, allowing myself to feel the hurt in its full capacity and dealing with it. When a person breaks a bone, those osteoblasts and osteoclasts move in immediately, repairing the damage with such fervor that it heals in the fractured position. The bone must then be rebroken and splinted before rehealing. That’s how I felt. Did I want the short term healing that will leave me pseudo-healed in a fractured position, or could I handle being fully broken, splinted, and then healed fully?
I chose the latter. I am not a forgiving person. I remember everything. I can recount exactly who crossed me the wrong way, what you did, what time, and the whole aftermath. I hope you know that I’ve only ever said those forgiving words maybe one other time in my entire life.
I keep telling you that I feel weird. Perhaps the right term is “broken.” And slowly healing. Slowly. I try to pretend ‘the incident’ didn’t happen sometimes, but it just doesn’t feel right. I want to pick up exactly where we left off because I am impatient for things to settle back into our comfortable routine, but I can’t help but feel distant. Sad. Lonely. I am being true to myself, true to the plans and promises I made a year ago. I always do what I say I’m going to do.
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