False cynic

 

It continues to amaze me - in spite of making significant headway, am still prone to recurrences of wretched cynical leanings.  They are always as astonishing as they are unnatural, yet entrenched.  

From my earliest days, cynicism was prevalent in the very kernel of the voices those around me prized as most worthy.   Unfortunately - for me, at least - I prized the cynicism, as well, which the others apparently did not.  I was just a little kid - didn't know better, didn't know it was cynicism.  To me, it was the natural way those who mattered most in our lives communicated, so I followed along.  

Took until my early 20s (!) to get even a glimmer that the way I communicated might be considered hard, harsh, even mean.  I certainly never labeled it cynicism.  It was only through an teaching evaluation - someone pointing out it is a lousy way to teach - that the light even began to dawn & I started to suspect that cynicism was the unimaginable heart of my communication style.

How lovely it would be to say that was all it took - someone pointing out the folly of my ways - for me to cease & desist.  Not so.  It's hard to stop doing something you experienced as normal.  How to know what normal is, if not that?  Might sound easy - it is not.  And it confused the daylights out of others - coming across as light & sunny, then stumbling into darkness.  Better, much better, but seems there's still a ways to go.

There are those stumbles, just waiting to be made.  Made just such a one this a.m., processing a situation with a highly jaundiced eye.  Realizing, hearing someone else's more upbeat take, that it was just as reasoned as mine & infinitely more whole.  

My cynical side is my false side - false, but still arguing to be considered more real than my true optimisitic self.  On a morning like today, when my innermost being shrinks in horror from the let's-look-at-this-with-a-sneer intruder, am reminded there's still work to be done, giving the cynical voice the boot & letting the more hopeful healthy wholesome self come to the fore.  

At times like this, on days like today, I shrug off Oscar Wilde & embrace my Inner Dory - Just keep moving.  Just keep moving.  Just keep moving.  Away from the false; consistently closer to what's true.