Dancing with Myself

I talk to myself. A lot. No, not in public … well not in very public areas. I talk to myself in the car, in the shower, as I grade… well, you get the idea.

I also talk to people/creatures/ things that can’t talk back. You can call me crazy, but I would much rather talk to a dog, a baby, or the guy sitting next to me in traffic playing the air drums than the people I actually encounter in real life half the time. I guess maybe it’s because I don’t really care about the result of the conversation as much as having the conversation, if that makes any sense. Some people are the journaling type… but I always got so distracted, and if no one was ever going to read it, I didn’t really see a point.

I feel as though now is as good a time as any to confess that I used to make fun of people that blogged. “If your stuff is so great, then why aren’t you a published writer?” This was my general (internal) comment to people that would ask me to “follow” them on their blog.

But maybe some of these people feel the same way I do. An ashamed and truthful fact I confess here and now is that I am not the best listener. I always want to finish the other person’s sentence for them, and this MUST drive some people crazy. But it’s not what you think at all. It’s not that I know better than them, that I have the solution to their problem, or that I am an expert. It usually comes from a good place. I usually just want to scream, “I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU MEAN, AND YOU AREN’T CRAZY AT ALL… and let me tell you why…”

I talk all day. And I’m pretty lucky, because I get to talk to kids about a subject I love and adults with whom I have important, silly, and intelligent conversations with. But sometimes, I don’t want to talk about what anyone else wants to talk about. Sometimes, I just want to talk about what I want to talk about… and maybe I want to talk about it for more than five minutes, hence the conversations with myself in free and inconvenient moments. I once got busted talking to myself by a student during my conference period. That’s right about the time I started locking my door during conference period.

An author was writing about being an introvert and he said, “I am something of a recluse by nature. I am that cordless screwdriver that has to charge for twenty hours to earn ten minutes use. I need that much downtime. "

That really is me. I have notoriously, my entire life, picked jobs that require me to be in front of a group. It’s like I turn something “on” when I get in front of people, and suddenly I can speak to a group by using humor or silly charm. But when it’s over, after I teach five periods back to back, I am exhausted. My fellow teachers and I were talking about this the other day. It’s like having a stage act that you perform for your audience…and then there’s the real you. I am an introvert, but you would never know it. I actually prefer to do things by myself, and I have my entire life. So when I start to talk to myself, sometimes it’s the only time in that entire day that anyone has seen or heard the real me… and I guess I might as well be the person who gets to spend time with the real me.

People who are writers, real writers, are doing exactly what I’m doing. They just don’t look crazy because they have their conversations on paper and not in their car like I do. So I decided I would split the difference. I’m not a real writer, but I only look crazy half the time now, instead of most of the time.

The other day I was leaving for work and I was not wide awake yet. I tried TWICE to use my car door clicker to lock my front door before I figured out that it wasn’t going to work. And right there, out loud, in front of the seventy year old dog walker passing by I said, “Jackie, I swear!”

I should be concerned because he looked at me like I was crazy, but I just said hi to his dog and got in my car.