For as long as I can remember, I've been one to push boundaries. To ask crazy questions. To live in the grey space. I've challanged my mother and her conventions every inch of the way. "Life doesn't exisist in a vacuum!" was almost a mantra to me. Sometimes I blurred the lines because compromise was an easier way to get things done and move on, which is something else I am good at. Other times, I blurred the lines because it was easier for me to live with certain realities if I allowed for that grey space.
Several months ago, I was with a good friend with whom I've had many in-depth and existential conversations, usually over a few beers. He told me that wasn't good enough. I laughed him off. Being a free-spirit is one of the things I love most about myself. It has always been way too hard to define myself as one thing or another because I use my intuition to make my mind up. My opinions, while generally well-researched and deliberate, are all over the spectrum and atypical.
Yet recently, I've started to think that there is a little bit of truth to needing to make things black and white. Blurring the lines is not always the best practice in life. Compromise is not always the most constructive way to get things done. Because sometimes there just simply is a right and wrong way to do things. And while I've always prided myself on my ability to make decisions when it seems like so many people are indecisive, maybe I haven't aways made the best decision because I was too busy trying to appease everyone or just get it done.
I don't often wear my heart on my sleeve, so it's easy for me to push my personal feelings aside in favor of diplomacy and efficiency. Even though I try not to let emotion cloud my judgement, there are times that my intuition and emotions become tied together; it's hard to tell the difference between what logic is telling me and what my heart sees when looking at another person's face or hearing their voice.
As I leave behind my young adulthood, I realize more and more that despite my past practices, blurring the lines has a tendancy to leave things more complicated than simple. I find myself looking for rules and order because I want to make the right choice. I realize that sometimes I can't just count on my gut to make ALL of my decisions. While my self confidence is probably at it's all-time best, there's a sort of freedom in knowing that you don't know everything. And I'm learning to trust. To trust myself, and even to trust other people, which is something that I never do, despite the fact that some people have earned it many times over.
I've mentioned before that I work in higher ed. Therefore, I'm around a lot of people who are legally adults, but who are nowhere near truly being adult. They make a lot of bad decisions, and it's frustrating to watch, especially when I see so much potential in them. For the past few years, I've been trying to take advantage of opportunities to mentor some of my students. I had some wonderful mentors over the years and I wanted to pay it forward. I've tried to be a friend, older sister, authoritarian, even at times, a fear monger to them. And I've found that you can't tell people anything they don't want to hear.
I've been taken advantage of and interrupted, now my own limits and boundaries tested. I firmly believe we teach people how to treat us, and I was not teaching a lesson that I intended. A lot of the error in my ways was because I had blurred the lines so much. Having an open-door policy and being a free-spirit wasn't doing me any favors in this aspect of my life. Some people may have no problems being 100% politically correct and appropriate, but that's not me. I missed having an outlet, and I realized that I was giving too much of myself where I shouldn't. So, it was time to take the figurative machete to my facebook and twitter page. Not only was I clearing my newsfeed, I was re-drawing a line in the sand. A line between my personal and professional life, a line between those I wanted to share with and those I didn't.
I'm still friends (both in real life and online) with many of my colleagues, as well as friends I haven't seen in years. These friendships have been fostered by years of working together, stressful situations, undergrad school, graduate school, many late nights, and a handful (or two) of happy hours. This is one line that likely won't ever not be blurry. While of course it's not without complications, the respect we have for each other is real and highly valued. That's not to say there aren't some people in my life and on my friends list that I'd rather not share EVERYTHING with. What ever happened to facebook letting you sort your friends into groups with different access levels, anyway? But I don't post inappropriate or highly personal things on my page, so I just let it slide.
Maybe there's a reason why "older people" are so set in their ways and, to my way of thinking, unable to adapt or change. It's been a source of frustration for me for years because I could never understand it. My world was (and at times, still is) always changing, I didn't want to be left behind. I'm as stubborn and hard headed as they come, but I could never be accused of being rigid or a wet blanket. But always going with the flow isn't a good idea. The tide can pull you somewhere you shouldn't or don't want to be.
Your values and priorities tend to change over the years. The security and stability that my parents provided me with for so many years is what allowed me to place a high value on flexibility, creativity, free thinking, and change. They worried about things that I either took for granted or that weren't even on my radar, whether it was praying for my soul or buying my books for college.
Now that my mind has shifted to other things and my future, so have my priorities. Things such as my health, my salary, and my stability are now things that value in a way I never did before. And when you're looking at something like your health or paying your bills each month, there is no grey area. You're either healthy or you're not. You're in the red or the black. There is no in between.
Blurring the lines became a sort of habit for me. Internally, I knew, or thought I knew, where the lines were, but I wasn't making them apparent to other people. Those closest to me know where my heart and mind truly lies, but what about the roughly hundred other people I interacted with on a daily basis? I'm not looking to make a drastic change in my personal politics, but maybe it's time to take all that grey space and put it into focus. With the proper lens, maybe I'll see more of a checkerboard.
No comments:
Post a Comment