Being Yourself

When you were a teenager, did a grownup ever say to you, “Just be yourself?” To me this was exactly like them telling you to: “Go look it up in the dictionary.”

How in the name of all that is holy and precious would you find the right spelling of a word in a place that requires you to know how to spell it to find it in the first place? Grownups never had an answer for that, because they, like us, had never actually cracked a dictionary. Why couldn’t they at least give you a hint, like the first three letters, to get you started?

I could have used a hint about being myself as a teenager. When I was busy doing exactly what I wanted to do, like flipping someone with a rubber band, people got mad at me. That’s because I was so good at flipping rubber bands. I could hit someone in the chest with a resounding “smack” at 30 feet. It was a skill that I realized I could not practice on human targets. Same thing with hitting people with snowballs, especially when the snow went down their sweater. People don’t like these talents. So even though “myself” wanted badly to cream others with rubber bands and snowballs, I had to “deny” myself or risk getting a shovel full of snow in the face. Which actually happened to me this last winter.

Let me tell you about it. I’ve got this cranky neighbor who was shoveling snow one day as I was walking my dog up the street. I playfully threw a snowball at him from about eight feet away that hit him in the leg. He happened to have a shovelful of snow ready to sling to the wayside, and instead threw it at me as if to say, “I am the neighborhood jerk and don’t you forget it, so you’d better take your sissy little snowballs on down the road, missy.”

The snow hit me right in the face, and since I wasn’t expecting it and had my mouth open, it went down my throat and clogged my windpipe. I couldn’t breathe. It was actually quite frightening, but I got my throat unclogged eventually. Then I kept gulping in cold air, which caused a whole ton of new coughing. I have to admit I played this up a little once I realized I wasn’t going to die. It was a dirty trick to respond with a whole shovelful of snow to one measly snowball.

He felt terrible, which he should have, and later brought me a very nice bottle of red wine which I thought was penance enough – that and landing in this blog.

I see I have yet again gotten sidetracked from my original subject, which was about being yourself. I don’t think anyone should tell kids that. Tell them to be nice. If they don’t know what nice is, spell it out for them. “Don’t hit people in the chest with rubber bands, even if you are the best rubber band shooter in the whole wide west.” And “Don’t strangle people with snow.”

This makes way more sense than giving kids some vague words that mean absolutely nothing. If you want to know the truth, I still don’t know who myself is, but I know I like the parts of me that are kind and sweet and considerate, so I’m glad that “self” is starting to win out over the self that is ornery, mean, and spiteful. Sometimes.

And one final word. Thanks to my dear friend, Google, I never have to use a dictionary again. Not that I ever did much. A dictionary is like a First Aid kit. It’s good to have around but you never want to have to use it.