Building Sand Castles

Had a discussion with Email Buddy Eric the other day via email – natch! I can’t remember how we got on the subject but it included my finally admitting that I’m not the low maintenance girl I always believed myself to be.

Stop laughing.

Oh, now I remember. He had commented on something I’d written in an email, and I wrote back that he really did know me so well. To which he responded, “Can any man really make that claim?”

And so began this philosophical discussion wherein I disclosed that for a long time I hadn’t been self-aware, merely self-absorbed, and how I now realized that those weren’t the same thing. I concluded with the statement that I believed that the more you know yourself, the more others can know you. That’s when I told him I’d finally realized I was high maintenance.

I swear I could hear the laughter through the speakers of the computer.

"You just realized that?"

Apparently other people can know you better than you know yourself.


I was out with Dog the other day, and for once he wasn’t working at yanking one of my arms longer than the other. The Eagles were on my iPod, and I was thinking about how often I have to remind myself to ask someone how they’re doing first, instead of waiting for them to ask me to respond in kind. That’s when the whole “self-absorption” thing hit me. I won’t even address the fact that it’s really self-absorbed to be wasting your time analyzing just how self-absorbed you are.

So, now I’m going through this phase where I’m trying to be focused more on what’s going on “out there” than “in here.” And perhaps that even explains why I’m posting less these days. It’s not only that I’m super busy. It’s that it takes a certain amount of introspection for me to compose. I have to get inside my head with one of those red plastic shovels and dig around in the wet sand for a bit before I can begin to build anything even resembling a castle.

Instead of being so inside of myself and staying safely under my big pink beach umbrella where everything’s pretty and nice, I’m out in the bright sun, sticking a toe in the deep blue ocean. I’m talking less. I’m listening more. I actually read a newspaper the other day. I asked how someone was doing and waited to hear her response.

What can I say? I’m a work in progress.

And maybe someday, I’ll finally get to a point in my development where a strong wave won’t have the power to knock my castle over and leave me standing by in silence while I watch it all disintegrate into the sea.