Knowing Thyself

This is how it started. Checking friends' blogs one day, I came across an online quiz to figure out which Jane Austen heroine I am on one of Allison Eddy-Blouin's blogs. What fun! (For other Austenophiles, see www.strangegirl.com/emma/quiz.ph.) So I took the quiz and turned out to be Elinor Dashwood. I sent the link to Gillian, another professed lover of Austen, and she took the quiz, ending up another heroine. Unlike me who can barely remember the character Elinor Dashwood, Gillian clearly remembered her heroine and what she disliked about her.

I thought about conversations I had recently with my boss, with old friends, with close friends, sitting down with them, putting work aside and talking deeply about personal struggles and joys. I am so impressed with the importance of putting the public face aside, of really getting into another person's character. And I realized that my tendency with books, movies, my fictional writing, real life events and friends is to skip over the characters (as if they were secondary and not, as so many writing teachers have adamantly stated, primary) and wrangle with the big message, the overarching theme. I didn't remember Elinor Dashwood because I wasn't interest in her - I was interested in "the point" of the story.

I went to graduate school with the - mostly - unconscious goal of saving the world through education. My great plan was to finish my degree, enter the world of education policy, and become a great pioneer in education reformation. Near the end of my studies, I realized that as important as policies can be in a framework, what really matters in education is what happens when a teacher enters the classroom, closes the door and leads the class - it's the one-on-one, individualized, person-to-person interaction that is most important. Six years down the road, I'm still puzzling this out, finally starting to focus less on the framework (what does it all mean? what is the theme? what lesson can I draw?) and more on my friends' hearts, who each person is today, now.

There are so many reasons I tend toward analyzing and synthesizing stories (realy and fictional) - my Myers-Briggs personality (INTJ), my family circumstances, my desire to get a message to learn from, my college training, my community, my fear of big emotions. For quite a while, tending towards the intellectual rather than the heart was a survival skill through times when I was not yet equipped with emotional skills to do anything else. And like so many bad habits, I just wasn't ready to do otherwise. Sometimes it just takes a crisis (or four) to knock us over.

I find great joy in what I've termed my new addiction - getting behind the public face to hear my friends. I also have great sadness in those friends I've had and who I passed up this chance with. There are one or two in particular who tried so hard to get behind my wall, to call me out, to give me the chance to be emotionally naked, who I rejected. I wasn't ready. I have been blessed recently to have the chance to talk to old friends and those friends I've known for some time and to deepen our friendship, to take the wall down and meet in familiar and foreign places.

I have been so surprised - now at 33 years old - about how much there still is to learn about myself. How much I thought I really knew me!