Bite-Sized Pieces

TOPIC PROBLEMS

When I’m trying to write weekly blog posts, there’s a lot of pressure to think of topics. Typically, the more I write, the more topics I can think of, and the trouble is capturing them down rather than drumming one up in the first place. But sometimes there are so (SO) many words and ideas and situations and feelings in a single week that I have absolutely no idea how to distill them into bite-sized pieces for your consumption. 

But, tonight, while sitting here trying to narrow down a topic, I keep wondering: what if bite-sized pieces aren’t really accurate? 

Now, bear with me, please, I’m going to jump around a little. 

PERSONALITY TYPE PROBLEMS

I’ve been trying to avoid social media lately because it really doesn’t help my soul in any positive manner. (Please do what benefits your own soul, though, no judgment here.) But like a good Millennial, I still need something to do on my phone when I forget to bring a book and I have to wait for an oil change at Meineke. So I scroll through Pinterest. I look for home decor ideas, laugh at weird cartoons of cats with knives, and I learn things–most recently about my personality type. 

On the Myers-Briggs test, I’m an INFJ, which is apparently a very rare, very conflicted, very emotionally unstable type (eye roll). We are insightful and observant, but we have trouble voicing our thoughts, and often struggle to tell others how we feel. So much so that the good people of Pinterest offered up this meme:

Good heavens, I can’t think of anything I’ve related to more in the last year. It is a mess up in my head, y’all, and in a fun way. Truly getting to know me means hearing the conflict, the chaos, the fun facts, and the not-so-fun feelings. But to make matters worse, I am not good at verbalizing any of it. In any given situation, I have so much going on in my brain, but I just cannot get it out. 

(Well, with some alcohol and a lot of time, sometimes I can put my thoughts into words. But certainly not in any manageable, bite-sized way. There are a few wonderful people who will listen to my chaotic thoughts straight from the brain, but even they start to glaze over eventually.)

BITE-SIZED PIECES

So, over the years, I’ve limited my communication mostly to bite-sized, acceptable pieces. Instead of an hour-long info dump on the life and times of Ariana Grande-Butera, I’ll boil it down into one single fun fact about the making of Wicked. Instead of telling you the seventeen emotions I’m feeling, I’ll say I’m tired. Because I am. Of trying to communicate. People want me to speak to them every dang day. Do you know how exhausting that is? 

But tonight, after seeing Wicked: For Good (no spoilers, I promise), I was thinking about how we all naturally try to do this. We look at each other and try to fit each other into bite-sized pieces, instead of seeing how we can be complex and enormously conflicted. 

People are never one thing. There are confident people who are insecure. Kindergarten teachers who like heavy metal music. Republicans who care for immigrants. Democrats who pray. Sweet grandmas who swear like sailors. We are all complex, paradoxical humans. And none of us is really bite-sized. 

ACTION STEPS

So, what do I do with these thoughts? And if I’m not interested in making myself smaller and less complex, how exactly do I expect to write a weekly blog post of 300-400 words that has a meaningful message to people from all around the world? Thanks for asking. I have absolutely no idea. 

But I do know that the people who mean the most to me are the people who don’t expect me to come in bite-sized pieces. They allow me to contradict myself, or change my mind, or represent more than one side in an argument. Or, even better, they don’t mind when I waste an entire evening telling them the plot of a movie they never want to see. 

Which means that I want to make more room for people not to come in bite-sized pieces. I want to make more room for your complexities, your contradictions, and your weird obsessions. I don’t know how to do that yet, but I’m thinking about it. 

What about you? Do you ever find yourself trying to exist in bite-sized pieces? And what do you think about that?