Insecurities A Go Go

I've realized that recently my blog has degenerated into a lame diary relating my daily activities which can probably get pretty boring to read. I think we'll make this a self-reflective post. A change in myself has recently become apparent to me. This change would best be stated in a rather dramatic evaporation of feelings of insecurity. I noticed the change - well in reality someone else noticed it - a little less than a month ago. It's kind of weird writing about this because I KNOW she's going to read this. But anyway, she claimed that I come off as "cocky" and at times "elitist." I'm pretty sure that these are two things that I have rarely, if ever, been called in my life. And at first I blew it off that it was just my facade personality. For a while now I've put up a facetious cockiness, where I act a lot more cocky and confident than I actually am, but in such a way that I expect people to take it as a joke. I thought maybe I wasn't making it clear enough that it was a joke. But then I began to wonder if maybe it wasn't really a joke anymore. Sort of like how when I was in high school I used a lot of self-deprecating humor in order to get laughs, but on some level I was really believing what I was saying about myself.

Now, I'm not sure if these things are causational or just correlated, but there definitely seems to be some sort of relationship between my self-boasting humor that I've begun using and this new found confidence. I don't know if it's even right to refer to it as new found confidence as much as the vanishing of many of my insecurities. I guess it's sort of a combination of the two, as confidence and insecurities mix together about as well as oil and water. I don't find myself getting sudden feelings of inadequacy like I used too. Perhaps a big reason for this is my change in environment. I went from Princeton, where quite frankly I tended to be a bit inadequate in my academic and intellectual life to home where when I go out to bars I often feel like an intellectual giant. Or at the very least I'm able to more than hold my own in any sort of debate regarding public policy or pretty much any issue. At Princeton I would just sort of sit in the corner like the little kid at the grown-ups party. Perhaps it's in part that I'm not with those ridiculously smart people anymore and perhaps it's part that those people and what I heard while sitting in the corner rubbed off on me giving me a new found ability to discuss real issues at will. Then there's the other issue of the fact that I seem to be able to steer discussions into my areas of expertise more easily than I was able to in the past as well as the fact that I'm much more up to date on current issues as I read Newsweek and watch the Daily Show (sure it's a joke news show, but they do actually bring up things that are really going on, which is informative).

Here's the other things I've noticed. In the past I've had some issues at work. Things were not going so well with my boss and I kept on screwing up in small ways and getting chewed out. I've looked back to when I can think of when I lost many of my insecurities and I feel like it happened about the same time things started to turn around at work. I stopped screwing up and I stopped feeling like I was going to crap my pants when I met with my boss. Again, I don't know if it just happens to have occurred at the same time or if my confidence and my better relationship at work happened at the same time for some reason. All I know is that things are going really well for me right now and I have every reason to feel cocky. I don't think I've been putting off an obnoxious cockiness, after all people are still willing to hang out with me, and I don't think the people I surround myself with would put up with an obnoxious level of confidence. If anything I think people might like hanging out with me more. My patheticness level has dropped a lot (and considering how much it had already dropped between high school and college, I didn't really think it could drop anymore) and I feel like a less pathetic and more confident person is more fun to hang around with. Besides, despite the fact that I can be really cocky, my friends know that I don't really think I'm better than them. I'm just better than everyone else.

Green is the color that everyone sees all around me
Grey is the color I see around her, she's just blur