azurelunatic | Larval-state Lunatic

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Nephew shooting up the house with lazer-gun hobbyhorse

Larval-state Lunatic

Perhaps someday I'll generate my own opinions rather than listening to everybody else and echoing. I'm realizing how much of me is just mirrors and echoes to avoid pissing off those around me.

I wonder who I really am.

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sometimes I have the exact same worry about myself. Especially since I'm an Ayn Rand fan, and have difficulty with my self being tied up in others opinions and views. But this is life, not literature. It also doesn't make you any less real for you to form opinions based on others, as long as they agree with your inherent nature, and you aren't changing just b/c you want to be like someone. I think that's my own thought, anyway. Oh bah!!! My head hurts now! Thanks a bunch! ;)

There's something I've got in mind that I haven't changed my own opinion about, but appear to have joined the other camp because of not disagreeing. Agreeing with the other camp would not do well with my own nature. Yet, losing a friendship over this disagreement is also against my nature.

So I keep my mouth shut.

While you're considering, don't automatically discount the opinions of those around you...because sometimes we intentionally surround ourselves with people who hold the opinions we actually have so we don't have to argue so much. :)

I'm talking about the sorts of opinions that I've observed changing based on the people I've been hanging around with at the time... most often it's an opinion I'm close to neutral on, pending information -- I tend to outwardly act as if I reflect those opinions, and sometimes internalize them a ways, only to reject them when I move out of those circles.

And then there are those stubborn strong issues, where I very quietly believe what I believe based on a well-thought-out opinion, with my research being done, and then continue to outwardly reflect the opinions of those around me, even contradictory ones, by silence or minimal support, because I don't want a conflict -- in some cases a conflict that might cost me a friendship.

I'm becoming more sensitive to where my inputs come from. I have a conservative mother with liberal values, and a liberal father with conservative values. At least, that was my original spot-analysis, and I don't think it's changed much. I'm tracing the roots of the values I've got, and I'm trying to track where the new ones come from. My values change based on my current job. My values change based on my living situation, my friends, ever-widening the circles of "acceptable", refining and honing "unacceptable".

And yet there are some things that I will, within myself, refuse to change; things that sharply contrast to other deeply held values of my friends. And, valuing non-conflict, and recognizing this as an irresolvable point of conflict, I keep my mouth shut and behave.

deep down inside, we all know who we truly are if we dare to look... sometimes its WAY to scary to go there so we try things like hiding, violence to get attention, wearing masks, etc... to try to be something other than what we are. One reason why I focus so much on "keeping it real" it may not be pretty, but it's all about being true to yourself and not being a faker. Either way, we all have to follow our own way which is right for us.. who knows, maybe there's people out there that to be themselves, they have to be someone else, I dunno, but it is a thought. Assimilation goes a long way...
The only thing we all can do is to be ourselves, improve ourselves, and live...just live.

D.E.

Trouble I sometimes get into, is when I know there's something not worth fighting about, when fighting may lose me a friendship, I just shut up about it, even if every mention of it they make grates on me, if it's that sort of thing where an agreement can never, ever be reached because of a conflict of core values.

Losing a friendship would hurt more, though -- all you've got to do then is pray that there's never a situation where there must be a fight.

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Larval-state Lunatic

empathetic headache

Re: empathetic headache

no subject

opinion

heart to heart

Re: heart to heart