One Creative Introverts Effort To Take On The Extroverted Marketing World…

Welcome to day number eight of 365 Days Of Marketing And Me… where I guess that yesterday’s I’m Not Going To Take It Any More Day’s theme is still in effect… as I woke this morning to yet another cut and paste keyword-based response to the issue that’s been stealing my attention from this project… and has me stuck in this irritable mood…

I think part of my problem is that… being self-taught… I’m either a little off on my logic… or use the wrong words to describe an issue… leading the trained “expert” more interested in telling me that I’m wrong without exploring where I was close… usually… once I finally throw a fit and people listen to get the context of what I’m saying and not just the words… they often find I was close and then the actual solution seems to follow…

I just wish that I could figure out how to skip the two-month process that it usually takes for my context to be understood… when all it would take is to read the words to the end before they start predicting solutions because often I’ll find that support addresses the area of the note where I share the steps that I’ve already used to resolve my problem… instead of the second half of the note that updates where things are at now…

I also feel that another part of the issues comes from the fact that I have nothing but sisters with no real male influences in my life… leading me to have a similar issue that I hear women complain about where I can’t seem to figure out a way to be more assertive without feeling like and being treated like a bitch… well… jerk in my case… but I also guess a bitch by more than one alpha male… thanks to my passive approach…

Though I can become passive-aggressive… but the most part I’m just passive since… ultimately… I just want to be left alone… I often fear that speaking with confidence can come across as mansplaining which is another thing that I can stand… from having things constantly mansplained to me by my mother and sisters’ horrible taste in men…

I always wondered if this is why… while living in Seattle… I ended up with a lot of lesbian friends… which either baffled people because of the way I can be offensive when I joke… but more likely it just led others to say it’s because I don’t know that I’m gay and after the unavailable… but I was never accused of being after any of my male friends who were available… and nobody ever factored that into the equation…

Not that I care all that much about what people think of my sexuality… if anything… the mystery seemed to just another thing to keep me interesting… I always felt I was too tall… too fat… and too ugly to get the girl of my dreams… so… minus the sexual tension… I found it easier to stay just friends… without inevitable When Harry Met Sally… men and women can’t be just friends coming along to fuck everything up…

I also feel like I got along with a specific brand of lesbian… the kind who have nothing but brothers… leading them to like more dumb guy stuff and are interested in girly girls… kind of like my male friends… looking back… now that I’m back at home… and interact more with my sisters and mom… I can see that I’m on the opposite side of the same coin as my lesbian friends…

They used to talk about all of the shallow things that their brothers and/or dad would say about women casually while watching TV that destroyed their self-esteem… I noticed while watching the Bachelor… how critical my mother and sisters are towards the men who look and or act more like me… well act like me since no dating show would ever cast my fat ass… but the same thing happens when we watch movies or scripted shows where the funny fat guy is never the one that ANYONE is after… just like the “ugly” girl…

I also have the issue where my sisters are always encouraged to pursue their interests… and are even given help… and I’m always lucky that I’m a guy… so things should just come easy to me… or that I should be able to figure it out on my own… because my mom didn’t know how to give advice to her only boy kid because she didn’t understand my interest… the same way a dad might not understand a daughter’s desire to dance…

Keep in mind that I’m old enough to catch the end of the days when traditional gender roles were much more important… now that time has passed with single-parent households being normal… I hope there’s less of sex-based divides over how to raise a kid… especially if the “appropriate” sex to offer advice is no longer there… or doesn’t exist in the first place… sometimes… I could go for some genderless guidance when looking to resolve a conflict… or any kind of guidance at all… instead of always having to count on my own trials and errors… where the results just go unnoticed either way…

Oh well… I’m too old to look back now… besides… I need to get to today’s assignment so I can get to bed…

The above intro is not meant to be a gripe about my upbringing… it’s supposed to be an attempt to highlight another opposite side of the same coin connection that I have with females in honor of the fact that the 365 Days Of Marketing book says that it’s Women’s Empowerment Week…

Yes… I may have been an outsider as the only boy… but I wouldn’t say that any exclusion was a form of abuse or even intentional… if anything… I was often left out because of societal beliefs of how each gender should be treated… I don’t even know if I would say I was excluded… more often than not… I was treated like I wasn’t even there… while the mother and sisters would casually share their true opinions that they wouldn’t dare share in mixed company…

I thought it was interesting to hear those real thoughts because I often agreed with the girls over the asshole they were either married to or trying to date… I just hated that I’d get hit with shrapnel… and how they never seemed to empower each other enough to confront these men… instead… most of the talk ended up being just venting… to get any frustration out of their system… to then act like whatever incident never happened and is never discussed again…

Years ago… during 365 Days Of Resolution… I tried to do my part to help out the cause by resolving to stop saying “You guys…” unless I was talking to nothing but men…because I always felt it was odd when anyone would say “you guys” when I was the only man…

Here’s a link to that post… hopefully I explained myself well enough throughout today’s post… I ended up getting interrupted all-day to where I couldn’t recapture the same train of thought when I would return from whatever distracted me… hopefully… as this challenge goes on and I get back into my blogging groove… I’ll get better at preplanning what I actually want to say with each post… and leave enough time to rewrite an entire post if needed… which… I probably would do right now… if it wasn’t almost midnight…

Oh well… the challenge is still new… and there’s always tomorrow’s post to get right!!!