I’ve always felt the need to show off.

Show off how smart I am, how funny I am, how much I know, and so on. For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to perform in a flashy way that earns me praise and that makes the people around me happy.

I guess that makes me a natural performer, despite my crippling shyness.

Somehow, all that shyness vanishes when I perform, though. Patient readers know that I have never had a problem with stage fright.

I am, in fact, way more comfortable performing for a group of people than I would be if I was at a party with them.

Unless, of course, I’m performing at the party.

Like I have said before, manty times, when I am on stage, all the complexity and confusion of life suddenly disappears and everything crystallizes into just me and the audience and the audience is there to watch and listen so the relationship is really just me doing my best to entertain them.

Like Will Smith says…

I can totally relate, Prince. Me too.

I guess it’s because when you are performing on a stage, you have one hundred percent societal permission to make it all about you. To dominate people’s attention as much as you want in order to show off in front of them as hard as you can.

It’s the exact same behaviour that gets hams like myself in a lot of trouble as kids because in regular life, it’s quite rude.

In real life, you have to share the limelight, take turns in conversation, and in general making things all about you is terrible behaviour.

The fact that sometimes you can get away with it if you are entertaining enough just sends the wrong message to spotlight seekers like myself.

Now as to why I feel this need, I couldn’t tell you.

I can say for sure that it has been with me as long as I can remember. I was trying to make people laugh and make them happy when I was still in footie pajamas.

So any psychological theories involving it being a response to trauma on some level has that to contend with.

If anything, the trauma of being raped and bullied explains the opposite : why I have done so little with this performing urge in my lifetime.

Because I am too damned shy, and who’s fault is that?

I know it’s not natural. That’s so clear to me now. The natural me that I was meant to be is expansive, confident, charismatic, charming, and the life of the party.

The current me is… not those things. Yet.

This all seems to indicate that I should make another attempt to get into standup comedy. Even though my mobility issues make that rather complicated.

Well I could always do it online. Record performances via my tablet, figure out where to upload them where they might get noticed.

I need an audience, though. Besides the one in my head.

Maybe I could live stream?

More after the break.

On being in charge

My relationship with being in charge is complex.

On the one hand, like any free spirited creative type, I loathe the thought of having all that responsibility. It would feel like a rope around my neck. I can’t be tied down like that, I have to fly free.

Because if I have the responsibility, I will have to take it seriously and do the best I can for people. There are no other options for me. It’s how I am built.

The fact that as the youngest of four, I have next to no experience having responsibility to others probably factors in there somewhere.

I was made responsible for myself at far too young an age. I supposed my adult-like way of talking and acting was all the excuse they need to fob off their familial responsibilities on a child who was still in elementary school.

And to be honest, I kind of collapsed under the weight of it all. As always, I got done what needed to be done like doing my laundry, but other things like packing my own lunch I just abandoned.

No one to pack a lunch for me? Then I just won’t have lunch any more.

In a strange way, this was how I protested my treatment. Part of me wanted it to be clear to the world that I was being neglected and I had been abandoned.

Did not work, of course. Nobody saw my lack of lunch and my untidy appearance and so on and said, “Oh my, this poor boy is obviously being neglected at home! Quick, call CPS, and get this poor boy some lunch, stat!”

No, they went, “This kid is gross, Eww.. And he’s such an arrogant little shit. Let’s ignore his cries for help and do absolutely nothing to keep him from being bullied and treat him like a leper when he comes to us for help.”

Yes, I can admit it : my natural air of intellectual confidence probably played a part in it. The fact that I wasn’t afraid of the teachers and treated them sort of like equals while I zoomed light years ahead of what they were trying to teach me probably caused at least some of them to sour on me and treat me accordingly.

I was never rude or difficult. I’ve always been naturally cheerfully cooperative to the best of my ability as a default.

I occasionally did challenge their authority by pointing out an error in whatever it was that they were teaching. But I swear I did it from a place of total nerdiness.

I honestly thought they would want to know.

But overall, I was a very strange child who did not act at all like the other children and whose reactions to things were entirely unpredictable.

And people hate people like that.

We disrupt society just by being who we are.

And do you really want someone like that in power?

I don’t think so.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow