Operation Achieve Anything: Day Three-Hundred-Fifty-Eight, Dateline 12-24-2018
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“We are so accustomed to disguising ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.”
Good morning crickets. Welcome to day number three-hundred-fifty-eight of Operation Achieve Anything. Happy Christmas Eve everyone, two more days until I can finally feel safe that all of the holiday stress is over. It’s not really my own personal stress that bugs me, it’s the feels of pressures from the others who want everything to be perfect that I feel that make me feel anxious. I have my own perfectionist issues to deal with, which is partially to blame for why I’ve locked myself away from the world, and need everyone else to be calm while I continue to try to figure things out.
I am working on it though, and do hope that by next year, I’ll be back to the point of being comfortable in my own skin to get back to making social appearances. Right now, I’m still working through who I am since my midlife meltdown and hate having to answer, “How are things going these days?” Whether or not this actually happens, I constantly feel the rolling of the eyes when I share my baby-step successes and hopes for the future. I’d rather keep that type of talk to this page, which I know they don’t read and that just adds to my level of uncomfortableness.
Then again, as I pointed out yesterday until I get paid, it would probably be just as awkward if not more, if I did think they knew what was going on in my head and not addressing it, then I would feel twice as uncomfortable. It doesn’t help that I’m starting to see that all of this time I’ve been developing this Wicker Breaker voice as my new persona, instead of the wild guy, Bunker who had more drug and alcohol-fueled ideas at the start of this ten-year experiment that this New Year’s will be six-years-old.
I’m not sure if this is a good or bad thing. I see it can be good because The Wicker Breaker voice is more about finding inner peace, but at the same time, it’s also just a new mask to cope with my introverted insecurities. The thing I like about this new mask is that it’s actually made of the pieces of me that were genuine, and outlived the bit from the old masked where I used traits from my heroes to build.
I’m learning a few things through the My Saturday Night Life challenge, that at times is an attempt to make sense out of my relationship with humor, that I started to lose interest in comedy, in general, when the actual comedy world seemed to be giving in to become much more PC. The main thing I feel like I’ve learned is that I’m not trying to hold onto the offensive content but can’t handle the people who act like they had any part in the mainstreaming of shock value based humor, that I know they were part of because there’s a piece of them on my old mask.
As a child who was raised by alcoholics and enablers, all of the denials that I’ve seen throughout my life is probably to blame for why I feel like I’m out of my mind. As much as I can agree and be proud of a person for changing their ways, minus the acknowledgment of the former perspective, and just bash other for your old ways, I don’t see this change as an example, so I don’t like when these people preach. At least not while I was still holding on to my old mask.
Building this new mask made up only of pieces of me, that may rely on references but are no longer carbon copies, I will no longer have to worry about having to justify hanging onto my old heroes’ way that they’ve decided to get rid of. I will no longer be stuck questioning why was it okay when so and so did this but it’s not okay when I did that. The funny thing is, all of this conflict is going on within myself because up until I started to see less humor in offensive things, I was always an innocent type that got to push things much further than others. Maybe it was that I just didn’t care because I knew in my heart that I was just trying to get a laugh and cheer up the room by getting them to think outside of their comfort zone. Again, at least that was my secret game plan.
I think right now, I’m still not ready to be social because I’m never fully there since I’m too busy weighing out how this new me will react and often end up saying nothing because my reaction time is too slow. This leads me to slip into the old me and start slinging jokes again. Though it’s still nice to get an entire room to laugh, by the end of the day, I just end up creating funny sound bytes and silly moments but nothing with any sustenance.
This fulfills yesterday’s assignment where I was supposed to think of each of my decisions throughout the day and question whether I’m making my choices base on my true beliefs, or if I feel like I’m following any outside influences. Yesterday, I opted to avoid a family event for all of the reasons mentioned above. I know they won’t read this, but I just share that is the reason I didn’t show up. I really hope to be healthy enough for a visit next year.
With that, it’s now time to introduce the assignment for today where I’m now supposed to acknowledge whether or not I wear a disguise, explore why, and then come up with a way to reveal more of your genuine skin. I don’t read the assignment for the day until I get to writing this end of the post paragraph and it’s funny how often I end up answering the next day’s questions in these Daily Breaker posts. Of well, I’ll still be checking in tomorrow with my Christmas update. Until then, it’s that time for me to sign off as usual 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.
