So...tell me about yourself

This has come up a couple times in the last week, and as I start sending out resumes and (fingers crossed) going on interviews, I expect that it will come up even more often.

Tell me about yourself.

The stats are easy: age, job, hobbies. Even the surface personality traits slip off the tongue. I am so used to being self-involved (read egocentric), and it seems like I talk about myself so much that you'd think this would be a simple request to fulfill. Hell, I have a blog where I tell the most mundane details of my life. I often consider myself an open book.

On further reflection, though, I realized that I don't tell the same things to everyone. I have friends to whom I tell sordid details of my love life, but I never discuss my hopes and dreams with them. I have others that I share my life goals with, but never tell them about the experiences in my past that helped to shape those goals. With each different group of friends, I present a different side of myself: there are professional friends, flirty friends, romantic interests, other damaged souls, kindred spirits.

So when a new acquaintance asked me to tell him something about myself that most people don't know, I was actually stumped. This person hasn't been categorized yet. I don't know what facet of myself I will present at future meetings. What if I start to treat him as an acquaintance with a common hobby and he turns out to be something else, entirely?

It makes me wonder if I will ever be able to integrate these different roles. The general fiction is that if you find a "soul mate," you should be able to be an open book and they will accept every part of who you are. ha.

And oh boy, the feeling that comes when you share some deep secret and you get (or at least feel) rejected for it...there's a reason they call that "heartache." Even writing this, I feel a tightening in my chest when I think of a recent conversation. Someone who had seemed to be so accepting of who I was, even encouraging, told me to stop telling them things because they were too disturbing. How do I not take that as a rejection of myself? How do I not, then, rehash everything I've ever told this person and wonder which parts of myself are being silently judged? Or even worse - openly judged.

A rejection of what I do is a rejection of who I am. I am the sum of my parts, but while some parts are appealing, sometimes the whole is a big ol' mess. So I compartmentalize myself. I keep up walls. It is a natural protective measure. And every "sling and arrow" adds another layer of insulation around my core, until the very thought of stripping down to my bare essentials fills me with panic.

My initial idea was to send this blog post to the new acquaintance, but I immediately started to analyze what the reaction would be. Will I be considered a drama queen? Narcissistic? Living too much inside my head and not enough in the real world? I imagine that his response would be "holy cow, I only meant something like 'I secretly hate cats.'"

So, instead, I will say something innocuous about how I had a job milking cows when I was nine. I will walk the line between being flirty and being funny, probably coming off a little flighty, and he will tell our mutual friends they were right: I am a fun person, with a breezy personality who doesn't take life too seriously (since that is the facet I present to this crowd).

And I'll throw on another brick.

Time Management

I have always been a procrastinator, like from birth. Seriously, ask my mom: I was three weeks overdue.

I spent some time yesterday cleaning...and by that I mean doing dishes and throwing away old junk mail. My bedroom is a disaster of clean, but wrinkled, clothes that were on the bed but now are on the floor. (How is it that I have so many clothes and never have anything to wear?) But as soon as I was able to clear a path through the mess, my enthusiasm was decidedly over.

I know there are people who clean up as soon as they are done cooking, never leave a towel on the floor, and whose floorboards are spotless. These freaks insist on cleaning and "getting stuff done" before they sit down to watch TV.

Me? The only reason I have clean spoons is because I canceled my cable last week and I'm tired of Vampire Wars on Facebook.

But are these other people any happier than I am? Are their lives improved? I used to be like them...back when I was married and felt I had to live up to the hype. But now...oh lordy, a nap is so much more inviting.