There's Nothing Wrong With Me

[Jimmy]

I realize that I was never wrong, I was never broken.  I was conditioned to think that I was… different.  And I’m starting to see how toxic my family was..

I never thought it would be me.  I spent my whole life hearing about stories about people discovering their family was the problem but I never thought it would be me… because mine was perfect and I was just a weird little boy and it was my fault they didn’t understand me.  As I’m growing, getting what I want, doing things I never thought I could do like taking on a new job in a day, figuring out how it works and making money off it, I realize that I haven’t had conversations with people the way I want to.  I want to talk about, social norms, money, favorite sex positions, inside a persons head, how weird it is we all go to this place to sit down and just be in the same room, what intelligence is, are their really any differences between people, where do you want to go in life, what are you afraid of.  Things like that.  And I never have because I was so afraid, I was too afraid to be different and right now I realize, I’m not different.  I’m just me.

Topic

[Anonymous]

the post reminds me of a quote by dr suess

“be who you are and say how you feel, because those who mind don’t matter , those who matter don’t mind”

I can relate with the ” feeling afraid” part. You know, my teacher used to tell me that even after 10 years of teaching , she still feels butterflies in her stomach when she comes to stage. I saw a video ,where, jay shetty(creator of inspirational content) was interviewing lilly singh( a youtuber). They both were talking about how they both feel anxious before any event that they do.

okay, lets say that you want to talk about social norms with someone, maybe you could go near them and tell them “, hey, i just read something interesting about social norms, wanna hear about it” or something like that . Of course somewhere during the conversation we might have to gauge the other person’s interest level.

or

let’s say that you are interested in having a good conversation. For this, you can go and drop a “hi ” to a person of your choice and ask them some questions and gauge their interest level , plus, continue the same. if someone likes a topic, they will talk about it with interest and you will be able to sense that. I’ve observed that to become friends with someone ,sometimes, one has to initially stay genuinely interested in the other person’s life.

let us know how your conversations went on.

[Jimmy]

Continuing on with this.

I did it. I went out and said how I feel in the moment.  I felt powerful, in control.  I almost picked up an older woman 😉 Walking out, I wasn’t the same man walking in.  Thank you Leigh.  You’ve changed my life in so many ways, I just didn’t realize it until now.

[Nathan]

Keep at it man. It’s liberating, but also an ongoing journey. I know I still catch myself regularly on this. It’s like a muscle, the more you work it the easier it will get. You might lapse every now and then, but just pick yourself up and stick to it 😉

[Leigh]

Hey, that’s awesome, mate.

One of the most important realisations I ever had was that the problem wasn’t that I was different, the problem was that I was trying to be the same. I thought I was the one that was broken and wrong and stupid and weird, but I wasn’t. I was just me.

I didn’t need to change to meet their standards and they didn’t need to change to meet mine. We just had to acknowledge that we were different and then find people who were on the same page as us.

So glad to hear you’re finding the answers to your challenges. Keep us posted on how things are progressing.

[Author]

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