identify 10 things that make me who I am

I just feel more comfortable with myself. I never seem to be able to have a conversation with anyone. I try to talk but people are just unaware of me and keep talking. I make the correct noises like ‘oh’ ‘neat’ ‘too bad’ but I wonder what the fuck I’m doing. My mother talks right through my sentences so I just shut up. My sisters (I don’t know why I’m mentioning this) just totally ignore what I’ve said, it’s like I’ve opened my mouth and no sound had come out. I feel hurt and rejected. I know I am not important to them. I just stay away.

I am aware of how other people are feeling and that effects my moods. I really need time alone just to recooperate, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get lonely. When the surrounding gets too noisy, smelly, or crowded I feel exhausted. I often feel like an outsider, especially in my family, I am easily hurt, stressed out , frazzled, but on the otherhand I hear, see and feel more and have a strong sense of empathy. I have a vivid imagination and find beauty everywhere. When I am in crowds I like to have a ‘wall’ around me so I can feel safe. I am happiest when I am with my daughter, my mother or my little 11 year old niece. I love my animals, my dogs AXL and Lil. Just being around my horse Tucker revives me.I am reading “A New Earth” and that helps me deal with my pain. I keep telling myself it’s not about me. I’ve always felt like I’m ‘weird’ but at the same time I don’t want to be like those others. I see this now as a gift, a chance to be an artist. I know that my family sees me as weak and needy, but they are wrong, I am strong.

i am strong, like all the women coming from grandma licha. we can stand our own ground.

brutal decisions; mostly on my own personal matters, but it inevitably affect others too. A close friend of mine says I have “no respect for anything,” and I think that probably summarizes it. If I decide to do something then nothing is safe from being sacrificed. By normal definitions I do go overboard… (many of the things that a sane individual assumes untouchable, really are not! Perhaps not wise to throw away or discard your social life, childhood dreams, or even life essentials like eating/sleeping, but it can be done, as experience shows :)). I think when it comes to making my decisions, I’m like a ruthless manager to myself :)

Maybe too many years in engineering school has made it even worse (unfortunately I can’t blame it all on education. And my stubbornness certainly helps too!). You know, the spirit of “using” things to get tasks done, which requires a certain level of abstract impartiality towards those things. I sometimes scare myself with too much impartiality, and possibly for the same reason, I try to avoid situations where I’m in charge of managing (or making decisions for) others.

I was born in a middle-class family, lived a middle-class life, and probably will die from a middle-class cause (cancer or car accident or something!).

I guess middle-class people rely on their own work to gradually improve their quality of life, not totally satisfied, but not in vain and waiting for miracles either. I have seen it in generations of my family, and I am no exception. In addition, there is this “responsibility” on the shoulder of the middle-class to keep the society together. That includes getting involved in things to reduce the stress between the upper-class and lower-class portions. In the middle is where most of the life goes on… I have no complaints about happening to be there.

But that’s not all of it… it seems life thought we would be a good fit to play the “glue” to hold the pieces together; so, more often than not, I have found myself playing the mediator between the religious and the secular, the majority and the minority, the conservative and the liberal, and the traditionalist and the modernist. It’s a tricky job, and I think it’s gotten into me… how long is it supposed to go this way? :)

I’m mellow! Or lenient, or bland… (with a poor vocabulary!) whatever you call it, I don’t mind. I guess somehow in my early twenties, the wall of black and white, right and wrong, good and bad fell apart, and never came back up. The result is that I don’t have strong opinion for/against many things. I can also partly blame my habit of abstraction… if you give it a little time, you can make a case for/against almost anything, you see. :)

Mellow and stubborn? How could that be… well, how about being stubborn in staying mellow?! I’ve heard the words: “Come on, make a choice, voice your opinion” probably more than average; but come on, there it is… I’m voicing my opinion by refusing to choose one over another when I don’t see the difference! There are other people too who don’t have strong bias in the pancake versus waffle case, aren’t there? :) I am yet trying to figure out the few things that really matter among the abundance of choices we can make.

It makes life easier, you know, to get along with everybody (which I needed dearly, growing up in an environment divided by radically religious and radically secular tendencies). But there are occasions that it needs to be avoided (for instance, the person in the deli section usually does not consider “it doesn’t matter” as an appropriate answer to “what do you want on your sandwich,” no matter how true it is!). On the other hand, it takes something out, “character,” if you wish, which is usually distinguished by the contrast between different people’s choices/preferences. I guess I feel a little under pressure in that regard, to the point that I occasionally “fake” preference. :)

mom
wife
daughter
sister
friend
i am trying to be these things, the best i can. i know this sounds like i am living for others, but i feel good about this.

in real life, that is, clearly not here :)

I guess since being quiet accompanies other qualities, people tend to associate it with different things; one who is quiet may be shy, polite, dumb, deep, .... Somehow the cause and effect get mixed up, though [and I think believing in causality is the Achilles’ heel of human reasoning, but that’s not the point here… not trying to be paradoxical]. I don’t think I’m particularly deep, dumb, polite, or shy (I have no problem embarrassing myself in a crowd, for example, wanna try me? :))

I do enjoy listening and observing, and I’m not that good in multitasking, so most of the time I settle in the situation that I enjoy the most (which doesn’t include talking; writing is a different story… it’s more like talking to myself :) It has it’s own place in the budget!). So yes, in a social situation, I bore the heck out of you, and I enjoy it :) I like watching people’s reaction to awkward silences: fast eye movements looking for a subject to talk about, looking for a mean to communicate, looking for a way to break the uncomfortable silence :)

I’m fine with my quietness… One can be quiet like a higher-end vacuum cleaner, right? It’s not necessarily a flaw, even though in my case, it might as well be :)

When we were growing up, the country was in war, the economy was tight, and the society was experiencing its post-revolution era with a sense of isolation from the rest of the world. You have little choice but to develop a thick skin in that situation :)

And then, going abroad (or coming, I should say) was another cause. The experience of living in another society as minority was something I had no idea about until it happened to me! Surrounded by a strong flow of contradicting culture, frame of values, and traditions to deal with, the only viable choice seems to be reducing sensitivity to details.

I’m not easily offended (occasionally, “sorry, I didn’t realize you were insulting me” is my answer!), I don’t react strongly to criticism, and it takes more than one thing to knock me down. Partly good, partly bad, but that’s how it is right now.

It started quite innocently, and upside down, literally! My dad used to spread his newspaper on the carpet and read it out loud, and I used to sit on the other side and watch him read… so, I learned to read upside down first :) (Consider the show-off situation: proudly picking the book upside down… well, it actually happened!)

Being a fanatic reader somehow resonates with the school system, I guess… you do a little better than average and get encouraged and the whole positive feedback sends you rocketing in that direction! There was nothing to stop me, as long as I ate and turned on the lights when it got dark :) What happened was that I read a whole bunch of things (and there were enough in our library at home) before I was mature enough to understand a word of them!

I read, and I’m not picky about it at all… I read everything, anything! Textbooks, junk ads in the mail, restaurant menus, signs on the shops, fine-prints, and of course, “the internets.” I’m not sure how much of it gets absorbed, but that doesn’t seem to be the concern (well, I can read it again!).