Humans are bizarre.
Frankly, I could leave the post there, but I’m not sure how I feel about being so cryptic, at least not today. Usually I’m so happy posting something out to the ether and secretly wondering “I hope someone reads that and wonders what I’m talking about - how deep am I?” but right now I feel like explaining myself.
For those who know me, the last year has propelled me through the most phenomenal growth, or at least so I’m told. I moved jobs and indeed practically shifted countries, I suffered many hardships which will forever alter me as a person and struggled to keep going when I felt my worst but yet here we are, May 2016 and it’s as if I could be a year ago today and feel as if I’ve looped right back to the beginning.
I’m good at two things; 1) I’m worryingly black and white, a good sense of right and wrong, and 2) pretending to not be human.
Let me tell you why, in a nutshell, I pretend to not be human. The bottom line is Humans Suck. I really want to believe they don’t, I really want to be part of the growth of humans and generally mentoring them, but time and time again I’m proven that humans suck, so naturally I want to distance myself from them. If you know the fire is going to burn you, why would you put your hand in it?
Today was a painful reminder that I, in fact, am a human.
There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they’re necessary to reach the places we’ve chosen to go. ~ Richard Bach
Truth be told, every time I ever heard someone say “Change is hard” I laughed inside. Hard. I genuinely thought “how difficult can it be for people to change.” Surely everyone knows that as humans we evolve? Oh, how much this year has taught me.
Change is so, so incredibly hard.
Everyone always talks about the fights. Everyone always talks about how to “manage” change. Everyone always explains that you have to be the change. But there’s one thing I’ve learnt; more important than the change you want to happen, is the ability to be flexible yourself when the change you want to happen isn’t happening quickly or, even more scarily, isn’t happening at all.
All of the management training hours, all of the “executive intelligence” reading does not displace the fact that you are human, that you need things and that you have feelings. As a highly emotional person, I do my best to shut myself off entirely - to not show emotion as much as possible, good or bad, but frustration is one that permeates through everything. Even if you smiling, if you’re frustrated you hear it in the words that you say. The words you choose are just a little bit sharper because I’m hurting and I want you to too. The tears when you’re down burn just a little bit more running deeper in the skin than you could ever have imagined. And it sucks, it just plain sucks.
You say things you clearly don’t mean. Someone hurts you, so you want to hurt them back. They made you look a little stupid, maybe? Well you’ll show them their place. The cycle continues.
I’m conscious of this cycle, and I don’t want to be in it anymore, so I constantly box myself off, slip into the numbers and replace bits of me with machines - get rid of the heart.
“Jonathan sighed. The price of being misunderstood, he thought. They call you devil or they call you god.” ― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull