Random Thought Of The Day #705

Day 705

They tell you, "write what you know", and that's what I've been doing. For the past year, I've been writing what I know.

What they don't tell you is that by writing what you know, you get to understand yourself a lot better.

In a way, it's a manner of therapy. And in another, a manner of self-reflection on who you are and who you were. And in another, it's a realization of exactly when certain parts of you changed. For the better or the worse, they changed. And finally, it can tell you exactly when something fundamentally changed in you and who you are.

I've found that point. The point when I changed from being just some guy into being awesomest man alive.

It was during my Myrtle Beach Roadtrip story. The same story that introduced the Bullhorn Story.

Something about that roadtrip changed me. It changed who I was and who I would go on to be.

I wrote a few months ago that I am actually quite painfully shy. And that's true. I also wrote about how I compensate for it and how I work around my shyness. I wrote about how rarely I'll engage a new person 1-on-1 in the first encounter. I won't walk up to a single girl by herself in a bar, but I'll strike up a conversation with an entire group of girls in the same bar and cast a wide net. I jump at the chance for public speaking and I focus on that one person that I find a connection with and move on from there.

This story ended up being a quite defining moment for me. A week that changed who I was. I had never really found my way to compensate for my shyness before this trip. I wasn't the funniest of my friends. I didn't want the whole room looking at me before this. I was even pretty shitty about getting girls before this point. I was wildly self-conscious and never wanted to be "that guy". But something during this week changed me.

I think that it might have been the first time I was truly honest with myself about who I was and what I wanted and had reached a critical level mixture of apathy and frustration with life. I wasn't entirely sure who I was quite yet, and I had pretty much reached the bottom of my bucket of give-a-fuck about much of anything.

Sure, I had gotten my share of girls before this, and I'd built a lot of friendships, and I'd even been considered charming and funny from time to time. But this week changed me once I became brutally honest with myself about who I was. There's something to be said about a convergence of life experiences all occurring in a short period of time and how it can impact you.

If you read back a while, I had one story that I wrote about my previous best friend who got up and walked out on me without saying a word after I told her that I had feelings for her beyond just friendship. I don't remember how long ago I wrote that one, but it was a little while back. This roadtrip happened 3 or 4 days later. In the span of about 2 weeks, I got the worst rejection I had ever experienced up until that point, I was moving to a new city where I had no friends or family the week after I got back, and I generally had no clue what I was going to do with my life. My ability to give a fuck about much at all other than that exact moment was entirely gone.

I needed to be in a wholly foreign environment and I needed a couple friends for that little bit of confidence for that first effort of letting everything out without them feeling compelled to really out-do me. And I absolutely didn't give any fucks. It was a perfect storm for me.

The 2 friends that I had with me were the types that would already kind of defer to me on a lot of things, but were funny and fun guys to hang out with. And I had an audience of thousands that I didn't know and would never see again most likely. I was 20 and it was a form of a last-hurrah for me. I was going to make it one for the ages.

I did.

I changed. I realized that I could give a fuck less about what anyone thinks of me. I would be as ridiculous or as charming as I felt at that exact moment and fuck the consequences. I also realized that I was looking at girls differently than I had before. When I wanted nothing more than a 1-night thing or just wanted to get laid, I could. Getting laid before this week was a chore. I'm pretty sure that the girls whose attention I'd attracted before this moment were attracted in spite of myself.

But I stopped caring. There were a million beautiful women out there. And while I might not sleep with THAT girl, I was going to sleep with one of them that night if I really wanted to. I didn't care to tell girls what I thought they wanted to hear. I just told them the truth. And I told myself the truth too. Did I want to just nail her like a 2x4 for the night? Did I want to actually see her and get to know her more? Granted, it was the beach, but it was an attitude that I knew was not going back. And I told her exactly what I was thinking. Fuck sugar-coating it or saying that thing that you think girls want to hear you say. Just say exactly what you're thinking.

That didn't just apply to women either. It applied to everything and everyone. I became more intellectually honest with myself during this trip than I'd ever been before. And it was liberating.

I stopped caring if people thought I was funny. I thought I was funny. And I had fun doing it. You'd be shocked how contagious your own opinion of yourself can become. You won't be shocked to find out that; as your opinion of yourself spreads to other people, a handful have the opposite reaction and just instinctively hate you. So if you can't stand people disliking you? This is probably not the best thing.

You can't believe how much confidence you have in yourself when you actually don't care about the opinion of the masses or even any particular person but yourself. And you know what they say about confidence being attractive. Even arrogance is attractive so many. Arrogance mixed with a degree of self-deprecation and irreverence? Even more-so.

When you don't care about the results of what you do and just have fun, the whole equation changes for you.

It didn't happen all at once during this trip. The first ball that dropped that started it was with a girl on the beach the first full day there. I through caution to the wind and just did whatever I felt like and it worked tremendously. The second was when I scared the shit out of the biggest stereotypical cowboy I'd ever met. And the final ball that knocked all the rest of them down was the Bullhorn Story. That night, the world changed for me. And nothing has ever been the same.

I've lost track of who I am from time to time in the interim decade since this revelation, but I've always come back to it. My moments of forgetting this lesson have been minimal and short-lived, but they've still been there.

I have no idea what prompted this. I think I'm going to gut this and mix pieces of this into the book to explain some of the "why" alongside the "what happened?" of the story.