Turn the Hate Around

Fellow blogger and BlueSky challenge fan, Walking Disaster, is spinning up a challenge concept for regular blogging. Their blog speaks to my own snarky and irreverent approach to Serious Life Things and sorting it all out, so I was excited to see what might be in store. This challenge has us turning our internalized insecurities on their head and seeing what positives shake loose. Check WD's post out! (I particularly love item 2 on that list.)

Challenge Accepted

I found myself picking at personality quirks for the most part, my brain trying to respond to a classic "What's your biggest weakness?" interview question. I managed to put a more self-reflective spin on it than that, I think.

Hated Item 1 - One I've Already Reversed

Stepping back in time to my pre-school days, I apparently hated both my name and my hair. I don't recall the rationale behind this (though Adult Kellie and her therapist have ideas), but little tiny five-year-old Kellie thought her lovely quirky name was annoying and that her gorgeous bright blonde hair was extremely blah. So she decided she should be a redhead named Gloria. She had no plan to implement these changes and probably thought wishing hard enough might magically transform her overnight. This was also during the time I had a strong desire to be a character on a soap opera, so Pre-School Kellie likely thought Hollywood would take care of these details. This incident may have cemented the Drama Queen label that my mother tossed my way for most of my life.

Whatever Pre-School Kellie's drive for all of this, I emerged very much enjoying my hair color and my name, the latter so much so that I decided somewhere in my pre-teen years that I wouldn't change it in the event of marriage. And I never once questioned that decision, no matter how much it confuses everyone.

Hated Item 2 - Conformity

My early shift to hair color appreciation color notwithstanding, at various times growing up and navigating adulthood, I have despised nearly every aspect of my body. And on any given day, I'm sure I can look in the mirror and be more likely to find five flaws before I land on something I like. Some of this is internalized societal bullshit, natch, a need to ensure that what is visible of me in the world meets a particular societal norm. There are times that I really hate that aspect of myself and am actively working with my therapist on this. I want to be ME out in the world and be comfortable with that. I don't want to be Meets Social Expectations Barbie.

However aggravating it is now, this urge to contort myself into a particular box served as camouflage when I needed it, keeping certain elements of the world from noticing me. Nothing to see here, just a boring average non-threatening white girl, certainly only outstanding in expected and preferred ways. This tends to keep me off any unwanted radars. On the other hand, that blending can be used as a superpower against those same radars. I have weaponized it on a microscale, activating the bland Nice White Lady Mode at times when it will serve to protect or otherwise help those who don't have that camouflage.

Hated Item 3 - RBF

All that being said about my relationship with my appearance, I really struggle with my Resting Bitch Face. It's inherited, for sure. My southern grandmother can exude Bless Your Heart (Derogatory) energy just sitting and minding her own business. My extremely tall father would greet the door with what my friends thought was the meanest scowl. I do not enjoy being a part of this familial tradition.

It's caused me a decent amount of grief. I once foolishly decided to get my eyebrows waxed for the first time during a work lunch break. My RBF combined with red, puffy eyes made everyone tiptoe around me for the afternoon, checking to make sure I was OK. It felt so silly. Another time, I was walking at my usual "places to go, people to see" brisk pace at work, and my boss assumed I was storming around in some passive-aggressive way to let her know I was mad at me and hauled me into HR. (She was always looking for an excuse to haul me into HR.)

However, because everyone is always checking in on me given what they think is my total lack of Poker Face, I am used to being vulnerable and sharing what's really on my mind. It quickly weeds out the folks who truly want to connect and those who don't, at least.

Hated Item 4 - Clumsiness

As evidenced by my recent posts regarding a broken foot, I can find navigating the physical world challenging. The number of minor ouchies, major injuries, and even surgeries I have experienced because I suddenly found walking too much of a challenge is significant. Bruises just appear on my body, and I can't remember getting them because randomly colliding with furniture, doors, and other inanimate obstacles is a routine part of my day. I was unable to properly try out for the volleyball team in high school because I tried to walk through a coffee table the night before tryouts started and my knee objected and stayed mad for a couple of weeks. I broke my toe once in some klutzy mishap and I didn't even realize it until the ankle I rolled in a different walking oopsie couldn't heal because of the broken toe. I eventually needed surgery to fix all of that.

But my clumsy nature has shown me new paths to staying in shape (and all kinds of new experiences in healthcare). The ways in which I've had to adapt to mitigate the worst uncoordinated entanglements are many, forcing me to look at the world through a lot of new perspectives and considerations. And it's also forced me to not take myself so seriously. There's nothing quite so humbling as being taken out by a minor depression in some grass field. Or a small, clear polished stone hiding on a carpeted landing.

Hated Item 5 - Perfectionism

Yeah, this is very much the standard interview answer. It is also something that I have treasured and battled and hated and protected my entire life. Perfectionism is a shite coping mechanism for trauma. It never gets you what you thought it would and instead gifts you with so many secondary complications. When coupled with my puzzle-solving nature...let's just say work-life balance is hard to come by. I am very good at knowing just how much I can push out a given task so I can dive deep into whatever puzzle has captured my attention. Which is fine when it's just laundry or vacuuming that gets short shrift so I can finish a book or lose myself for hours in an RPG. The problem is when the "given task" is self-care or personal goals and the puzzle is the complexities of a day job in the healthcare industry. I basically tell myself some version of "I'll sleep when I'm dead" and keep working the puzzle. Months or years later, I wonder why I'm so unhealthy and unhappy.

However, this collision of perfectionism and puzzle-solving means I'm always looking for new challenges. Also it means that whatever work I do is usually more than just a paycheck. Call it altruism but that's elevating my stubborn need to fix something and fix it right. Yeah, I want to get paid for my time appropriately and I will ask and negotiate for that as necessary. But I'm not trying to find a career track that keeps netting me ever increasing titles and salaries. This is also where my tendency toward socialism over capitalism comes from. Someone once asked me how we would get medical progress if there wasn't a possibility of profit, and I found the question utterly baffling. There's puzzles? To be solved? To make people not sick? We need more than this?

Challenge Complete

This was a lot of fun. It was hard to use the word "hate" as I've been working hard to eradicate it from my self-talk. But teasing the positives out of those challenging aspects of myself was good. Now to keep those benefits in mind more when the grumpy self-talk emerges...

*About the image for this post: I went down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to find something with mirrors or reflections and found these amazing works by Raffaelle Mainella in the Public Domain Image Archive. There's a fascinating story regarding the book they are from, Nos Invisibles.