let lemons be angry

I signed up for my first psychology research participation session today. All we had to do was fill up a long survey with many repeated questions. I learnt that, forced to put down answers on paper, I'm a highly optimistic person who takes failure with patience and understanding. I suspect I'm not like that really. I can be optimistic where work is concerned, because I've earned the right to be. But put me in a room where people threaten to ignore me, and see me start predicting the worst things for myself and becoming "highly nervous". I would never take social failure with patience and understanding.

To me, my social situations are almost always imperfect. Without God's aid, I would be even more of a social klutz, tripping over hellos, not even making it to a smile. I never know what to do with eye contact. Acquaintances bewilder me. And what about companions of convenience? I adapt to unfamiliar settings by putting on my cold face. A careless slouch, a sideways glance, immobile lips. It tends to work. Strangers merely think I don't want to talk, and never suspect I don't know how to.

It's better with some kinds of people. It's a chemistry I can't explain. And it's gotten better over the years. Slowly I learn tricks. I learn that I can be frank; brutal honesty is funny. I learn that even if I was dragged up on stage in front of fifty people and made to do something outrageously stupid, forty of those people would not have remembered it the next time they saw me. I learn that I can prod people and hug them and tell them strange things, and that they like it.

I still haven't learnt how to go for what I really want though. I can't bear people being too polite to me, but I have what the chinese call a "guest's air" all the time. I don't ask for anything, I don't fight for anything. If you don't want to talk to me today, I won't make you. You won't even guess that I want to make you, that's how considerate I am.

Not being demanding doesn't mean not being dissatisfied. Because here I am, with happiness of 7/10 as rated on a survey, yet wishing desperately that more could have been made of the day.