Operation Achieve Anything: Day Fifty-Five, Dateline 2-24-2018
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“The louder he talked about his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”
Good morning Crickets. How are things going on this wonderful Saturday morning that happens to be day number fifty-five of Operation Achieve Anything? I’m still in a bit of a birthday funk as I continue to question my life choices and future existence as I wait for my personal celebratory day that won’t even exist for another two years. Again, I wouldn’t say that I’m depressed but I am definitely stuck in my head, thanks to the annual period of reflection.
Since I’m not all that inspired to ramble on in my intro, I’m just going to jump right in and start and share my findings from yesterday’s assignment. The lesson was about how to handle people who make you feel inferior… well… actually, the lesson was more about the fact that these people are a thing as it offered no tools to cope at all. It just gave a few examples of shitty situations to get the concept across.
As for the task, I was supposed to first make a list of the people who make me feel inferior and how they make you feel. After that, I then had to come up with a plan to change the situation. This plan isn’t necessarily to change yourself in order to be accepted by these potential nemeses, it’s more of a plan to figure out how to no longer consent to the inferior treatment whether it legitimate or just in your head since, ultimately, you’re full control over your own sense of self-worth.
This is another tough one because I don’t really think I need to make a full blown list since I already accept that the person who makes me feel the most inferior is myself. Granted, my step-father and several other family member really helped to get me feeling that I’m a worthless piece of garbage but for the most part, those people are all dead now or I just don’t talk to them which adds to my awareness that at this present time, my self-doubts are mainly fueled by me.
The ironic part is my step-father used to always go with calling me worthless during our nightly family arguments, meanwhile, I started working a paper route during my last year in elementary school that lasted through most of my time in junior high until I made enough money through babysitting to finance all of my needs throughout high school, while he never had a job and was fully supported by my mom.
I’m sure this stemmed from him having shitty parents himself but the fact that this mess of a man who had no real relationship to me was always around and defended by my enabling mom, somehow, led me to believe he was right all along because I never ended up really liking myself. This is why I often interact as a character of myself, thinking that nobody likes the real me.
It doesn’t help that the real me is super shy, so whenever people would tell me to just be myself, I either didn’t know what that meant or would embrace my shyness only to be ignored. I feel like the fact that there was a real polar-opposite of me hidden within the crazy party guy persona was what was compelling about me as an individual that made me interesting to watch from a distance, only to disappoint when people get near enough to see a truer version of me.
The fact that I’ve always been more socially rewarded for the crazier side of my personality turned me into a horrible student in school. Other than the fact that my dyslexia always made it harder for me to read, I never felt all that stupid since I grasped the concepts being taught well enough to get bare-minimum passing grades without putting in any effort at all.
One of my favorite examples of my school efforts was when my honor’s pre-calculus teacher once yelled at me after I aced a test because she wanted to give me more than a C in the class but she couldn’t because I didn’t do a single piece of homework. I wish this would have turned into a tale where she then took me on as a project to send me on the right course, but instead, I was just happy that with it being an honor’s class the C counted as a B in my official school record which gave me one more grade point to slack off with when it came to another subject.
The low grades didn’t help at home because I wasn’t seen as a smart kid who needed to be challenged but, instead, was compared to my older sister, who really loved school so my value was connected to my grades instead of my brains and was often referred to as stupid. Of course, I, being a stand-up comedy fan, used this to fuel my self-deprecating sense of humor, which did wonders for winning over friends but was horrible for my self-esteem.
I wasn’t taught the art of self-deprecating humor, between my low self-esteem and silly sense of humor, it just kind of came naturally to me. I remember the very first time that I used my self-hate to win over a crowd back in junior high. All my friends and I did was base on each other which is now more commonly known as roasting.
A group of us were walking home one day when I remember someone making a joke about me that was super lame. Rather than rebut with a joke directed at the kid, I took his joke and added to it in order to make him look dumb while I ripped myself apart in the process. I clearly remember this blowing the other kid’s minds to where at least one person asked why I would say such a thing about myself. Though I didn’t have an answer at the time, it’s now obvious that I was starved for attention and would do anything for a laugh.
Though some of the kids would use this self-lampooning technic from time to time, it wasn’t until high school, where my nickname was Loser that I met others who were also fully committed to the self-effacing comedy style. It almost became a competition to see who could think worse of themselves, which, lucky for me, was the only aspect of my life where I would actually win.
This self-hating approach to making friends continued to be successful as I entered my adult years. In fact, if I was only able to keep it up, I probably never would have left Seattle in my effort to escape the me who grew to stop joking and genuinely hate myself. This led me to push all of my friends and give up on my dream to earn a living while making movies.
As someone who was more interested in screenwriting than the actual making of films, I felt stuck in the lighting department where I was seen as the goofball who tells jokes and also has scripts just like every other crew member on the set. This was the worst part because I learned how to light on the fly and people respected me for that, meanwhile, I went to two different film schools for screenwriting and had been working on my craft for two decades and everyone just seemed to just think it was cute that I was an idiot dreaming out of my pay grade.
Unfortunately, I may have thrown out the baby with the bathwater in adjusting to fix this issue when I not only lost interest in joking about myself, but I lost a huge chunk of my sense of humor, in general, leaving me with an even lesser sense of myself. This is why I think that I’ve felt so lost for so long because even when I was “happy” with life, I only liked the character of me while hating the self that went unseen.
As for my plan of attack on how to fix this, I can’t think of anything more than to keep on, keeping on because I have made a lot of progress since moving home to where I’m no longer the bedridden crying mess who was just waiting out this existence and am now back to actively working towards goals, like these blog challenges that I started to counteract the medium-specific habits that I developed while strictly writing in screenplay-style prose.
Alright, if I’m being honest, I’m not fully sure if what I’ve written above actually fulfills yesterday’s assignment but I’m proud of my attempt so I’m going to consider day fifty-four to be done. As for today’s assignment, we’re continuing on with the reboot of the “less talk, more rock” brand of advice by going back to day thirty-eight which was a lesson inspired by the quote “talk little, do much.” As for the task, I’m supposed to be honest with myself and determine if I am “one of those people.” You know, those people who always talk about themselves while accomplishing nothing at all.
As always, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow’s update to hear my insights on this cliffhanger/assignment. Until then, it’s now that time for me to sign off with my usual pleasantry and say, 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.
