lykomancer | Don't be That Person.

We've all known one: That Person who is so passionately, fervently into something-- idea, diet, worldview-- that their aggressive proselytism actually makes you want to go out and spite them (even, or even [i]especially[i], if you agree with their general point) just to distinguish yourself from them.

You know, the health nut that's so annoyingly, over-the-top insane with their diet and exercise that you want to eat an entire box of doughnuts in front of them while moaning ecstatically about how delicious they are. You hit the gym once a week; you go for runs in the morning; you eat organic kale and wild-caught salmon...but That Person is so goddamn aggravating that you just want to put your middle-finger through one of those doughnuts and slowly eat it off while making hostile eye contact.

Or the Christian that you go to church with who's holier-than-thou, always preaching to you about their spiritual journey with Christ and ignoring that whole "pray in a closet where no one can see you" thing. You are Christian yourself, but everything about That Person's sanctimoniously pious life rubs you wrong like a crown of thorns in your junk, and so there's that wicked little part of you that likes doing "unChristian" like things just to spit in their eye. It's a terrible impulse, but it feels SO. GOOD.

I've been trying to start to change my perspective. Typically, what I'm attempting to do is called "positive thinking", but that phrase makes me want to hurl, so I'm just calling it "changing my perspective". Just the name change makes it more palatable to me, and if I want to actually do this, it needs to be a palatable as possible.

Because this is not easy for me.
This is not a little shift in thinking.
[b]This is a massive, concentrated effort to manually rewrite my entire inner processing system from the ground up.[b]
As a result, this is staggeringly difficult.
Also, this completely inverts everything I thought I was, and everything I've been told I am, which makes it doubly challenging.
[b]Thus, this is also a massive overhaul of my own identity.[/b]

I'm trying. I'm trying. I wouldn't do it if I didn't come to the conclusion that it had benefits that I could understand. But it's difficult. I have to basically stop and reprocess every thought and emotion like I'm awkwardly translating everything between my ears into a foreign language in which I'm not particularly skilled.

I was doing better than I thought.
And then I met That Person.
That Person who, in this case, managed to spin me into a depressive fit out of sheer malignant spite

Now, I have to go back to my struggle to change my perspective, with all of the challenges I already faced, even when all I want to do right now is wallow in my own angry, pessimistic glory.