Am I too old / too bitchy/ too boring?
I am generally pretty happy with the way I look. I like my face, my skin color, the strength, length, shape of my body. But now that I am editing the footage that I took last year during our ten week road trip I am dealing with a bit of a reality check:
That I actually look exactly as old as I am. I look tired most of the time, like any other mother at the schoolyard. There is no denying it. And straight away I wonder if I should continue to make those videos. Who would want to watch a tired mother doing mothery things just on a campsite instead of at home?
Reality check number two is I look and sound bitchy. A girl came up to me once and said: Do you know that people think you're a bitch? And I nearly fell off my chair. I didn’t enter into a dialogue with her but I will never forget that moment, because it really surprised me. I was actually super super nice (at the time). I was the type of girl that would get stuck listening to some weird old fella’s rant at a train station or some place and listen to someone for hours because I was too polite to tell them to feck off and walk away.
Hell, I even had a boyfriend once, for the sole reason that I didn’t dare to say no because I was afraid to hurt his feelings. I won’t recommend doing that sort of thing to anyone because he really didn’t understand why I didn’t want to do much of that french kissing on a street corner and guess what, he ended up thinking that I was a total psycho bitch. I never explained and he probably still thinks of me as the worst thing that ever happened to him. Which is fine with me.
Later in life I suffered a depression while trying to do an office job. I sucked at it and trying to do repetitive work behind a computer screen for 40 plus hours was very bad for my health. But apparently I scared people more than anything else. The director of that company made us do a ‘game’ for team building purposes. It had cards with words on them. So whoever had the turn had to pick a card, read the word out loud and then give it to the person it reminded them off. I got showered in the most horrible way. Every negative card in the deck was given to me. Insult after insult. I didn’t understand that people thought of me as being this horrible person. So I guess this was great team building for some. But for me the beginning of at least six months of not being able to do more than lie in bed watching Spongebob and quite some recovery time after that to return to normality.
But here I am looking at myself sitting in the car saying something that is meant to be a joke. I still laugh out loud about my own joke, but suddenly I totally understand that people think I am a bitch. I remember the moment of the joke. I remember I was having fun, but in the video my eyes don’t twinkle and my voice is much sharper than how I experienced it. I am not smiling even though I clearly remember I was. You can’t see that I am joking. I look deadly serious. So finally I get it. I look and sound like a bitch. I’m sorry for scaring you.
Aren’t I boring?
Every time I write, make a video, try to entertain people.
In the end it is all me. I thought my life was going to be way more exciting than it is. I work to pay the bills, clean and wash a lot because I have children, saving takes forever. Spent the last 13 year with the same person.
Boring.
The most exciting things in my life happens between my ears.
I could let these thoughts stop me from doing things. But I won’t. Still learning to do things for me, my fun and if people are interested fine. If they are not, also fine.
Why is that so hard?