Have you met yourself?

My good friend Kate says this to me all of the time. Most recently was this weekend when I had yet again lost my phone charger. Yes, the new one I had just purchased was some how misplaced. For the life of me I couldn’t remember where I had put it, causing a late night search of my office and a midnight search of my room. I had figured at some point I would lose my phone charger; I lose things all of the time. I just didn’t expect it to be in the first couple of days of owning the new phone. This line of thinking was what prompted Kate’s latest “have you met yourself” comment.

So I am introducing myself to all of those things that I refuse to believe to be true…lol!

1. I am not organized. I believe I am, honestly, in my head I think I am a very organized person. But if you were to ask any one of my girlfriends they would say I have no organizational skills. If I could just remember where I put everything then I wouldn't need to be organized but....
   
2. I have no memory. I am lucky if I remember something you said 15 minutes later. This is why I try to write things down or have people email me; otherwise, I forget. I forget words all of the time. It doesn’t matter if I have used it a million times before, or if I can define it. I'll be in the middle of a sentence and sometimes the word will just be gone and I will have to figure out a way to reword the whole sentence. If this happened every once in a while I would be fine. But we are talking once or twice an hour these days. Lol! I feel as if I have to relearn my entire vocabulary. Grr...
   
3. I am a drama queen. I never think I am and I don’t think that the drama is usually about me. But there is always some sort of drama in my general vicinity. Either family or friend drama. Maybe I am some sort of magnet for it, or maybe I am always making things worse then they should be…Hmmm.
4. I can’t multi task. I say that I can and most of the time I really believe that I can. But in reality, I can only multi task if I am not paying attention to details. It used to be that I could read and talk to people or listen to music all at the same time. Now I find that if I really want to read or talk or do any other task I have to have to be able to focus entirely on what I am doing.
5. I am not a good listener. As a matter of fact I am a horrible one. My eyes can glaze over during a conversation and it isn’t that I am not interested in you or what you are saying it is that I can only focus for so long before my mind jumps to 3 other topics. It is especially hard when I am on the phone. If I can’t see you I can’t focus solely on you and therefore I start focusing on other things…causing me to lose the thread of the conversation…because I can’t multi task! Lol!
6. I get lost easily. Oh gol! No matter how many times I tell my self that I will pick it up, I can’t seem to find my way around. I know the major places I have been and can get to and from pretty easily but other then that I am completely lost. And heaven knows where North is. I used to say that it was just this area. I mean I could get around Utah pretty well, but really that was only Orem and Provo and that was because I had lived there for so long I had pretty much been lost every where. Thank heavens for maps!
7. I am shy. This is hard for many people to swallow. But it is true; I just force myself to act like it isn’t. As my dad says, I spend a lot of effort trying to get out in front of my shyness, so it seems as if I am not. Inside though I am extremely shy and sensitive. I will obsess about conversations for hours after they happen: Did I say the right thing? Maybe I sounded silly…maybe I shouldn’t have said…. Etc. I will obsess about people’s reactions: Maybe they really don’t want to be my friend or maybe I annoy them, maybe they would rather be elsewhere. I don’t want to force anyone to be my friend etc. And before going out in the evening I almost always come up against the question: Do I have to go to another party? I would rather sit home with my book. Sometimes I can forget. When I make good friends, the ones that I know I could say anything to, then I can be myself, and not just the part of me I think that person would want to see. But that is pretty rare. For the most part I play the character that fits with the setting I am in.

And that my friends is the me I am trying to overcome. Some things are possible to change. The organization and the listening skills I am working on. I don't think the shyness will ever go away completely nor will the problems with my memory. But you change what you can and you live with what you can't, right?