We’re almost halfway through January and I thought it would be nice to see how the start of the year has been (it is very weird but if I don’t write things down, I can’t seem to properly take stock).

So what I’ve realised is that I’m extremely thankful for Christmas and New Year, not just because it was a time to gather with family and friends, but because there are two public holidays in two weeks. That’s definitely not enough time for a vacation, but it was enough to keep my sanity. I still find myself longing to take a holiday, though.

It’s weird. Sometimes, I think I’m okay, and sometimes, I feel like I’m just one incident away from breaking down in public. It comes and goes and I’m having a hard time trying to figure out why. I want to try and write it out but the words just won’t come. Plus, I feel like I’m becoming more sensitive to things, which is what the next part of this post is about.

Too sensitive or poorly worded?

So I was in this conversation about managing stubborn people, when all of sudden, someone says to me:

“You’re going to learn how to trick your future boyfriend into thinking your opinions are his opinions.”

Which throws me for a loop because… it bothers me a little.

If you tell me that my delivery is too rude or I’m too adversarial when advocating for something, yeah, that’s totally valid criticism and I am trying to improve on that. No arguments there.

But to me, telling me that I need to be less adversarial/more polite is different from saying that I need to learn how to manipulate others. I’m trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, but the advice comes across as rather sexist to me. I believe that men and women are equal, and includes being equal in terms of intellectual understanding (I know that this is a generalisation and that IQ varies and all that but basically I’m trying to say that the average guy is as smart as the average girl). When you manipulate someone (or believe you can), you’re basically thinking that they’re not as smart as you, or that they cannot be reasoned with and therefore, you have to trick them into agreeing with you

Or at least, that’s how I understood the comment. I don’t know, is this a valid way of looking at the remark, or am I reading too much into it?

Amusing updates

I don’t really want to end this post on me obsessing over a remark, so here are two happy updates:

First, I took another step to cut down on one app that’s not been making me happy. I started by posting there less (and here more) and last week, I decided to come clean about my feelings there. I’ve always been open there and it hurt that I no longer felt welcome but it was good to write it down. I don’t want to write it off completely since I still hope that I can get back the ‘welcoming’ environment I first encountered there, so I’ve moved it to a less visible second page. It’s been good not opening the app as much – makes me wonder how I became ‘addicted’ to something even though it wasn’t bringing me as much happiness as before.

Second, I was having dinner with a friend (a happy update in and of itself) when I thought I saw someone from school (if you’re from my schools and you’re reading this, please pretend that you don’t. I like thinking that my school friends and most of my real life friends don’t know about this blog). So anyway, after a very long and embarrassing time trying to ‘discreetly’ see if it was my friend, I realised that I was right! Okay, not realised, I managed to message that friend. It’s been six years since we last met so that was pretty cool.