Are you agreeing to be a nobody?

Are you agreeing to be a nobody?

The good thing about having a temper is that you get things cleared up now and again.  I tend to have a long fuse and nuclear sized blast, personally, which means that my relationships go through a lot of interruptions, unless I am in a particularly unusual situation.  Wolfe may be surprised to learn that I have actually been quite subdued in my response to our various misunderstandings and mishaps, since it is usually unclear whether he is doing it himself, or delegating it to a minion.

If you have a look at the welcome page, you will see that Ina Disguise is a lengthy response to a rather rude, arrogant and complacent individual, who felt quite safe to assume that it was OK to insult a stranger.  Your staff reflect you.

The fact that this stranger had already devoted a lot of time to something relatively important was entirely meaningless, and as a side product it wasted a lot of my emotional energy and time.  This is not his fault,  however, that much I do agree with.  I come from a fairly narcissistic family, so I am used to the ‘what do you mean I upset her, it is her fault for being upset’ response.

So I was left with a pile of emotional rubble, no family, nobody to look up to, which is out of character anyway as I am not in the habit of investing emotionally in fame whores.  People choose fame for a variety of reasons, and until I came across Wolfe, I did not have much respect for any of them.  There are several reasons for his particular love of being well known.  Pretty girls, money and providing people with health information, probably in that order.

So I was left with a number of alternatives:

I choose to accept that I do not deserve any common courtesy and am a nobody.
I choose to believe that I did something wrong by bothering to do a lot of intense academic work with the intention of offering it to a stranger who probably does not deserve it.
I choose to believe that I did something wrong by trying to give somebody a present.
I choose to believe Wolfe, my friend in London, or in fact Aldous, that I am way too ugly to be seen by anybody, and that women like me should crawl under a stone and die.
I choose to accept that by belief in any alternative hypothesis means that there is something wrong with me, and the evidence points to my having some sort of disorder, despite there being far less talented individuals out there promoting inferior values and work.
I rebel against a life history of being suppressed and do what the hell I feel like doing for a change.

It took several months to figure out the best course of action.  I settled on Ina Disguise.  There are a number of branches to the project, seen or unseen.  The main theme is, that I refuse to accept that I am either one of thousands of ‘fans,’ (there are many aspects of his work that I utterly hate, and I do wish that he had a completely different life, so I do not think that this is relevant at all) or sufficiently inferior to the rest of the human race that I am not entitled to say what I feel, when I feel like saying it. In the unlikely event that he does any more than check in now and again and read everything at once, which is what he has been doing since I made initial contact with him, then it is his look out.  He certainly didn’t care about upsetting me.

It would have been extremely unhealthy of me to agree to be a nothing, in order to do nothing, feel unhappy, and agree to be less than I actually am.  I have, in many respects met my match, and it is likely that I will spend the rest of my life alone as a result, presenting a further range of responses.  My personal choice is to enjoy the work and ignore everything else, and it benefits at least two people, never mind the thousands that have been entertained by my work so far.  I am astonished at the number of young people and men, in particular, who have been touched by my alternative take on love, life and work.

Whatever your approach to life, next time you self-evaluate, think about what I have just said.  Are you agreeing to be less than you are?  Are you agreeing to be second rate, in order to please someone that did not really know or like you in the first place?  Do you accept that everyone else is always right, and you are always wrong?  If the answer is yes, then you are the equivalent of a battered partner.  You are agreeing to be life’s punchbag.  Just say no.