Lately I’ve been thinking about some things I can improve on and what will help me develop more as a person. I think I’ve got a decent picture, looking back, on some stages I have gone through… I’ll try to go through them.
As a small child, I was pretty shy for the most part. I always had one or two close friends and had difficulty talking with other people much, except for those whom I knew closely. As I grew into the early stages of adolescence, around 12, my parents divorced and my mother took us with her back to the US while my father stayed in Germany (military). At first it was a fairly normal, but after both parents remarried, their new spouses were very strict and often unfair, overly authoritarian. In some ways my siblings and I felt alienated from the family. I think this was a pretty severe blow to my ability to relate to people and drove me to be more insecure. This, coupled with normal teenage problems like skin problems and the ridiculous high-school drama pretty much shattered any remaining confidence I had in interacting with people. I remember that I would constantly be thinking about what other people might be thinking of me. That, by the way, really kills a conversation. It’s hard to talk to someone when you’re wondering about how they will critique the next thing you say.
Anyway, I got to college and things started looking better. I had been looking forward to it, and everyone was very eager to make friends while no one knew each other. I also made a pretty solid effort to talk to people. After a while though, that kind of died down and I kind of fell into a certain circle of friends. Between then and now, I’ve become completely comfortable with who I am and I am a very confident person (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I discovered Objectivism during the summer after my freshman year <am I spelling that wrong or does the spell checker really flag Objectivism as a wrong word?>).
I think I have followed something similar to the following trend:
First I was shy and didn’t interact much with people.
Then I interacted with people due to social pressure and did okay… but only because my insecurities were a rigorous motivation to be socially correct.
Finally I overcame my insecurities and stopped worrying so much about what people thought of me.
I think at this point I am a fairly confident, well grounded person, but I must admit that I am not as eloquent as I’d like to be, and I think I sometimes come off as arrogant (or so I’ve been told). One acquaintance apparently thinks I am an ass about helping him with his classwork (I’m a few years ahead of him in my major) when really I’ve tried eagerly to help him and thought I was being very polite for going out of my way for him (a close friend told me this).
At this point in my life, I feel comfortable with myself. I feel ambitious and I think I am pursuing my career goals very well. What I could do better with is how I intertact with people, I think I am struggling with that. I know that sometimes I can be a bit dull to talk to and I think I keep to myself quite a bit, I don’t express myself very well and often healthy relationships need better communication. I can have conversations with new people but I often find myself uninterested. Even with people that I look up to quite highly, like my research advisor, I can tell that I make it difficult for them to continue a conversation (let alone an interesting one), if it’s unrelated to work we are doing. Especially when people are different from me, I have a hard time being myself and being moderately amiable.
How can I spur on these kinds of changes? I would like to be more comfortable and enjoy myself more around people in general, but I sometimes think I make the situation a bit awkward.
Thanks for taking the time to read/listen. Cheers.
But I get on alright, I just don’t have a lot of friends. Or friendly relationships with people I work with (but that said, I don’t have negative ones either).
