More adventures in snobbery

For years and years people have been describing me as sweet. Which never fails to surprise me. And has kinda rocked my proverbial boat because I’d gotten all used to wearing my snobby suit. Cramping my stuck up image and all.

In Sarah’s latest series about online rockstar-dom, she wrote:

The point, after all, isn’t to change yourself so that people will like you. The point is to gauge how accurately you are voicing your truths.

Ahhh, yes. That’s where 16 year old me got things very wrong. I’m pretty sure I was all about changing myself to get people to like me.

I definitely thought I should be sweeter. My best friend since fourth grade is actually Sweetness Incarnate. Also, supermodel beautiful. And lovable in a Homecoming Queen Every Year of Our Life kind of way.

So you might think this was part of my complex. But no. It was actually incredibly reassuring to have Earth’s Sweetest Girl as my childhood sidekick. (And dear friend, today… Hi!). Because she’s not going to choose to be best friends with some troll/ogre, right?

But her suchness was how I defined sweet. Not mine. I, after all, was stuck up.

And I had so readily incorporated the attribution of snobbery into my sense of self that being called sweet today usually makes me feel like a complete impostor. See, you do the dramatic reconfiguration of your suchness, but then when it works you feel like a total fraud. Crap.

I’m realizing that maybe sometimes, you’re trying to be something you already are. Only you just don’t see it yet. And maybe if something’s getting in the way of voicing it or expressing it, no one else can see it either. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

Sometimes being misunderstood probably has to do with me.
And if my sporadic introversion occasionally comes across as holier-than-thou, that is so not my intention. And I want to be willing to see myself and sometimes choose to act differently.

I would never be purposefully insensitive or cold. And I would hate to make someone feel jilted or left out. At the same time, I can’t make anyone feel anything. And I don’t want to try by wrapping myself up in some artificial candy coating.

And sometimes, it has to do with them.
Back in the day, when people called me stuck up, I would take on the whole thing. I let their description make the entire interaction (or lack of interaction which I’m guessing is what people really had a problem with) about me and my flawed character. My stuff.

But I didn’t have the  perspective to see that it wasn’t all about me. When people describe you as stuck up, chances are good that they’re not acknowledging any of their own stuff.

Which is totally understandable – it can be hard to look at the fact that, for whatever reason, someone doesn’t want to be thisclose to you. Still, I don’t have to take on the whole thing.

I’m just now learning to recognize and express the sweet that’s actually part of my suchess. And to understand that even if the dramatic reconfiguration failed, the quality was there all along.

And yes, if you’re a recovering snob or you have experience with the Candy Coated Cape, I would love to hear all about it.