In a metaphorical sense, at least for now.
Well, also in a very literal sense, I guess.
But what I am talking about is reversing my habitual meekness to embrace my largeness. To go ahead and be big and bold and beautiful. To defy my father’s dictum and attract attention to myself on like, an industrial scale. To walk up to the world, stick my hand out, and say, “Howdy!”.
And not even reflexively flinch when I do so!
To not be afraid to blast out my charisma and powerful personality at max volume so I can make the world notice and acknowledge me.
To stop being hesitant and timid and fearful and instead unleash my true personality, the real me, on an unsuspecting world and trust that the world can handle it.
But not really giving it a choice, either.
Because here’s the thing : I am an inherently overt person. I can be very friendly and approachable and outgoing. And I have plenty of social assets, like personality and charm and wit, to use as I learn to make my way in the world.
There’s really no reason for me to be so damned scared of everything. I am a strong and powerful person who was born to get what he wants out of life and it’s high time that I opened up my world until it’s big enough for my enormous heart.
And, of course, my massive mind. Basically, everything about me is big, whether it’s my shoes or my soul or my intellect.
Basically, I’m fucking incredible. I am a miracle in motion. I am ten tons of talent in a one ton container. I am a miracle worker, a genie, a wizard, and a guru all rolled into one.
Really, having all those assets in one person is downright obscene.
I have nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing to fear. Whatever happens, I will handle it, and I guarantee that the reality of it all won’t be anywhere near as bad as my fears and my anxiety and my depression say they will be.
Them dumb fuckers don’t know what the hell they’re talking about anyway. Can’t believe I have listened to them for as long as I have.
And I definitely don’t need to be afraid to be noticed any more. Why would I be? I am, to coin a phrase, fucking amazing, so why hide?
I will always be somewhat of an introvert. I will always prefer quiet, peaceful environments over loud, chaotic environments. I will always need and treasure my alone time. I will always have a small, tight knit group of friends instead of a wide group of people I only sort of know.
But the inability to go to the opposite extreme is hardly an argument against a course of action. I will never stop being introverted but I can sure as hell open myself up to being so in a balanced, healthy was instead of the sick, compulsive, shame-filled way my introversion has expressed itself so far.
I hereby grant myself permission to make a big deal of myself. I have every right to take up a lot of room on every level and to be unashamedly alive and present and in line for my fair share of the good things in life.
Like money. And sex. And success. In no particular order.
I don’t need to conquer the world (though, if you’re offering… ), I just need to find a place for myself in this great bubbling cauldron of a world.
And I am sure that with all my talent and my incredible mind and my big personality, there is somewhere in the world where I can be okay.
More after the break.
Memory and aging
It isn’t all bad.
You see. as we age, our intelligence shifts from active intelligence to crystallized intelligence. And both have their advantages.
Active intelligence is great for innovation. It’s the kind of intelligence that people like Einstein and Newton had, and it’s why so many top scientists do all their really amazing groundbreaking work before the age of 25.
In other words, before brain growth is complete. Probably not related but interesting.
What active intelligence lacks, though, is order and precision. Sure, that college kid might think faster and more broadly than his professors, and we need to value that.
But he can’t access and interpret his knowledge and his memories nearly as well. For our stalwart undergrad, the world is a fuzzier and more generalized place where knowledge, even in the subjects they excel in, is just sort of piled up in their mind without any systematic form of organization and therefore without the ability to induce patterns in that knowledge.
Enter crystallized intelligence. As we age and mature, the deep processing of the contents of our memory starts fitting everything we know into a stable, easily accessed framework and starts to find the patterns in the data that lead to a greater rate of compression for the information and therefore a greater speed and accuracy in accessing and utilizing it.
And I have been noticing that in myself lately. It started somewhere in my mid 40s, when I started noticing that I could remember things with increasing clarity, as if a fog had been lifted from my mind.
And that clarification has continued. I find myself remembering reams of song lyrics that I never would have been able to recall before. Episodes of TV shows I haven’t seen in decades come back to me like I memorized the script. Incidents from my past, sometimes entire conversations, replay in my head.
It’s quite thrilling and just a little bit scary. It changes the line between memory and reality in a subtle but powerful way, and that line has always been a little blurry for me anyhow due to having such a high resolution memory in the first place.
For some things, anyhow. For other things, I’m a dingbat.
So you see, aging does have some advantages when it comes to memory. Us old folks might not learn new things very fast, but by gum do we remember old things well.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.