Meeting with my Coach today occasionally breaks my head.
I’m not used to having so many epiphanies and tough realizations. Especially when coupled with tools and ideas to adjust or improve certain behaviors and situations. It’s weird.
An analogy that came up — that felt… oddly just right.
Maybe, it makes sense if I consider myself a very complicated (or perhaps not so complicated) web page.
There is visually immediate data within the hypertext and then there is the meta data. And only those truly bored or near and dear to me might choose to scour through the source code (and tease me about how ugly some of the innards are in there — ewww tables… — i’m not compliant…but then again have I ever really been?)
I put out how I choose to be received within each environment that I’m in.
And maybe it’s just a CSS stylesheet that determines how I appear to others in different environments: Work, Personal, Family, Romantic, Social, Creative, Political.
But the content’s still me. Right?
That doesn’t change, does it? And it’s accepted and respected by all, isn’t it? So what makes me so ridiculous that I put out the wrong stylesheet for the wrong environment? Project the social stylesheet when with Family to shock? The creative stylesheet at work so I seem like a hippy/slacker in flip flops? The Romantic stylesheet at well…I gotta work on that one anyway because that’s all jacked up…or maybe it just needs more lipstick. Etc. Etc.
Talking with a friend re: the notion of semi-permeable blogging or permission/relationship-based content access has made me wonder if I need to rethink how I live my life IRL vs just here.
It’s a struggle not to be so hyper-reactive or responsive in certain environments. For someone who’s grown up feeling powerless during a lot of her life, the whole notion of not fighting back and accepting things for what they are…for not responding to every thing…is both terrifying and hard as I’ve conditioned myself to a particular behavior. It’s made me into the exact opposite of the “mouse’ which I was while growing up. But going from one extreme to the other and using that as a blanket design in all the environments of my life isn’t appropriate either. What if someone’s reading me on just a mobile device after all?
How much relationship information or personal information needs to be immediately accessible and visible to everyone who crosses my path and why am I so insistant with the notion that everyone love and adore me for all that I am while thrusting my faults and failures to the forefront? That’s not necessary. I can, just, relax after all.
Maybe go to the beach again. I do so love listening to the ocean. I adore listening to rain too. I want to sit in my car as the drops hit the sunroof in a flurry that makes everything new again and clean. This is why I love car washes too, you know.
…
It’s a lot of navel gazing.
And cleaning up some code.