Yes, go on then, roll your eyes while I dive into another self-indulgent introspection. I'll keep writing though, if it's all the same with you.
What I mean is that I sometimes feel like me, the real me, is sort of prisoner to the me that everyone expects me to be. In fact, he's buried so far inside the murky dungeon that I'm not sure that even I remember who he is.
I bet I'm not alone.
This thought started yesterday. We had a recording day at church, and as often happens when we get musically intense, I found myself being asked lots of questions about what I was hearing as though I'm something of an expert.
Outer Me loves being asked questions about music. He's patched together things he knows, sandwiched it between things he likes, and now waffles on about how he thinks it should be done, as though he knows what he's talking about. But I was listening too deeply yesterday, and in the quieter moments, Outer Me heard a faint voice from the deepest depths calling for help.
Inner Me has no idea what he's doing and he's scared that this whole sham is becoming blatantly obvious to everyone around.
"I think it's a trade off between capturing the essence of the sound and playing to time," said Outer Me, authoritatively. Inner Me didn't really know whether that was right or not.
Work is the other place that Outer Me gets pompous. He seems to know about technical documentation and bullet lists and drop-downs and HTTP proxies and cascading style sheets. He rattles off things he's heard as though they were his own brilliant thoughts. Inner Me knows that essentially we're both winging it, every single day.
So, I wandered around yesterday, trying to listen while my friends practised. I had my hood over my head, presumably to look like some sort of Jazz-Jedi - an image almost perfectly reflected by the off-screen of my iPad, which showed a grey beard beneath a dark hood.
If I am locked inside myself, I thought, I probably ought to do something to let the real me, Inner Me, out. He's a cool, nervous artist clutching a pencil; he's a teenager sitting at his grandma's piano; he's a smiling student with a packet of biscuits, an old guitar and a song about fruit he wrote when he should have been revising. He's actually pretty funny.
But Outer Me isn't all that bad either. He's not exactly a jailer, anyway - he's just the victim of circumstances, defence mechanisms and cakefuls of pride. I think it might just be that if Outer Me lets Inner Me out, he might find a lot of things to help me be more of a whole person. If he's brave enough to do it.
Okay, you can stop rolling your eyes now; my self-centred reflecting is over for today. I'm off for a cup of tea at Noisy Starbucks.
No comments:
Post a Comment