A Confession, And A Doorway

I have a confession to make.

And that is that, by and large, I’m a nice guy.

By definition of being a nice guy, that means that I tend to be a fairly affable person, try to be kind, considerate, and personable.  I try and treat others with humanity, and be the best type of person I can be.
And that works well, in particular for other people.  For myself, not so much.  And that is partially my fault.  In my eagerness to try and be kind, try and be helpful, try and do the right thing, I wound up only hurting myself.  I tended to be over eager, too willing to do what the other person wanted to do, and be more of what the other person liked.  The result was often friendships and relationships with people that were more than willing to let me handle the entire load.  And why not?  I had presented myself as being an awfully convenient subservient entity to them.  I was the perfect helot to their Spartans.  And all it really led to was hurt and heartache.

I also have a social anxiety disorder, one which can be paralyzing at times.  It results in me having trouble meeting new people.  As such, time passed, with myself having more and more of a need to meet new people through other friends introduction, feeling more and more alone at social gatherings, and a feeling on inadequacy, as I would look at a group of friends I wanted to approach and join in with, or at a particular woman who caught my attention, but couldn’t muster up the courage to approach her.

And this lasted for fucking years!

After my most recent heartache, which I am still attempting to move past, and am having a fair amount of success on doing, I decided to start trying something else.

I decided to change….or at least, try to change to a certain extent.  I cannot change completely who I am.  In a way, that would be murdering myself, which would be a tragedy of sorts, because I actually am happy with the type of person I am, my interests, and most of my ambitions and plans for my future.  And that isn’t the problem.  It’s how I act around people, and how I approach them.

The first item on the agenda is to overcome my social anxiety.  I’ve been approaching, introducing myself to random strangers, and by and large discovering that my irrational fear of being loudly and verbally rejected is not the case.  Rather, a good many people are actually like me: fair and decent.  Granted, some of them are bastards, but the good comes with the bad.  It all depends on focusing on the good, similar to when I’m doing a sketch and see a line, a curve, a shape that works, and ignoring or eliminating the bad, which is when I erase something that doesn’t work.

The second is to be less accommodating.  Be a little more selfish in terms that I should only extend help to those that deserve it, and try not to go out of my way for someone, not when it’s completely unnecessary, or for a reason that isn’t simply altruistic or genuine.  Simply put, I should do it either because I really love that person, or because it's good for the soul.

And so, here I go.  I'm going to try and rewrite my own personal script of sorts.  And I'll be sharing the progress, observations, and other adventures and shenanigans here.