Being Real

It’s kind of funny, I just found out that someone thinks I was full of bullshit and playing mental games when I first met them. I have only seen them that once. Thing is I apologised when they first arrived, saying I was exhausted, I’d had to go to work that day and hadn’t been home long, I certainly wasn’t up to playing games. In fact, I don’t bother so much with games anymore, life is too short. I’m old enough to know better and quite frankly my life is full with wonderful friends, not loads but enough for someone who often found it difficult to allow people close.

So anyway, finding out this persons opinion of me got me to thinking, yeah I do that occasionally, about all the things we do to impress the people in our lives. Thing is it isn’t always the same tactic for different people. Around a person from a faith-based circle, we may try to tone ourselves down, change our language and deny certain things we think don’t fit, putting on instead things we do. Then with another group of people conversation can be more colourful, clothes perhaps more risqué and topics change.

Let me make this more personal for a moment. When I’m around church people I tend not to talk about sex. It’s not like I always put it into conversations but I try to keep innuendoes out or ignore them, when I wouldn’t in other groups, I perhaps police my thoughts more tightly. At the theatre, having an off colour sense of humour works.

Sometimes I wonder about myself because for all that I love God and have a heart that cries out for women in crisis, I feel far more comfortable sitting in a theatre bar talking about relationships, than I do in the auditorium talking to church ‘family’ after the service. I’ve gone into this sort of thing deeper in other posts, so for now I’ll just say that it’s perhaps because I feel there are expectations in the auditorium and there aren’t any in the theatre – as long as I learn my lines and hit my marks.

At a recent rehearsal I was asked why I wasn’t drinking, I said I was fasting because I felt it was what the big man upstairs wanted me to do, my director went ‘okay’ and that was the end of that. I felt accepted just being me and we all need that.

So back to this person that started this train of thought. I’m disappointed they felt the way they did because I had hoped we’d at least get along, the men in our lives are friends. I hadn’t gone into the situation with some underhanded agenda, I’m just not into that (I think it’s too much hard work). Granted certain circumstances are a little messy, but in this day and age so much of life is (soon divorces are going to include clauses about the custody of friends and how sad is that). Thing is I now feel she probably came into my house with some sort of plan or agenda and I didn’t meet up with her expectations. How sad to feel the need to live like that. To assume the people you come across all have an agenda. I’m not interested in living like that, I’ve got too much going on and the only way I can live the life I want is by being true to me.

So I wonder…how much of our lives is living true and how much is a façade? Me I’m all for being real. Others may not like it but how much pressure do you think we will take off ourselves if we do?