Hello, Crickets. Welcome to day number forty-seven of Operation Achieve Anything. Once again, today’s update might be a bit of a bummer because of the nature of the assignments that I have to report on. Just like with yesterday, the topic of the tasks deals with sorting through my personal flaws while reconsidering how I interact with others.

For yesterday’s assignment, I was supposed to come up with a list of my flaws in an effort to come up with areas of my life that I can work on. This is a tough one for me because I feel extremely flawed at this point in my life and I’ve lost my self-deprecating humor that the book suggests as a tool to acknowledge any issues I may come up with.

First off, I’m fat and ugly which has led to an extremely lonely life where I have always felt my looks have caused people that I’m interested in to keep a bit of a distance. It doesn’t help that I’m also really tall which only highlights my monster like appearance. I wish this was just in my head but I’ve been told by people who were close that my appearance alone was intimidating, not like a jerk but like Lenny from Of Mice and Men who could do damage without being mean but from not knowing his own strength.

Then we have my brain which is flawed with all kind of mental disorders. My depression has always had me feeling detached which is why I feel the silly side of me, that everyone used to like, was nothing more than a performance. My overactive negative brain is also why I feel that nobody likes my writing even though I don’t have much evidence that anyone’s even read my work other than a hand full of people.

Speaking of my writing, I’m also flawed with learning disabilities to where as hard as I try, I still jumble my words and struggle to express the thoughts as clearly as they sit in my head. Even though I’ve gotten much better over the years, I still can help but see myself as an uneducated hack who is borderline illiterate.

This low opinion of myself has plagued my entire existence and to add to the issue, I come from a family of alcoholics and enablers who taught me the art of burying my feelings with denial in an effort to avoid being a burden by reaching out for help. This is why every time that I ever sought therapy it never lasted long because I never felt pushed to delve more into my problems. As you can see, I’m fully willing to open up about what’s on my mind through my writing, but when talking in person the denial side sets in and I soften my stance on what’s going on in my head since I don’t want to be seen as broken beyond repair, which is how I’ve always actually felt inside.

This outlook that I have on life is what makes this current line of lessons about personal relationships so hard especially if you go by the old adage about needing to love yourself before you can love anyone else. I’m more of the school of thought that taught by the song, You’re Nobody Until Somebody Loves You which probably adds to my lack of a sense of self and am constantly exploring my thoughts to figure out my true identity.

Today’s assignment is to tackle the list of advice from up in the quote when communicating with others throughout my day. As a shut-in, this is a tough one because I’m so limited in who I talk to and when I do communicate with others, it’s either small talk while making a purchase at the store or talking about the shows that I’m watching during TV time with the family. This means that my conversations never get all that deep anymore, making this a bit of a difficult assignment to me. It doesn’t help that I also landed a job to work on tonight, so I may end up not talking to anyone at all.

Oh well, we’ll see what ends up happening when I check in for tomorrow’s update. Until then, it’s now that time where I close this thing out by saying, good day and good luck to you and all of your projects.

Talk to you soon.

Sincerely,

The Wicker Breaker

P.S. Below are links to my novel, which I plan to promote as part of Operation Achieve Anything, as well as a link to where you can buy the book that is providing the structure to this project in case you would like to purchase it in order to play along.