How to Crush Without Being Crushed

No matter how well we think we know ourselves, there’s always more to learn. We are, after all, constantly growing and changing due to the experiences and thoughts we have.

In this blog, I advocate using your crushes to learn about yourself. Before you can effectively do that, you need a solid starting point. You need to understand who you are now. Thankfully, there are a number of tools available to help with that–and most are readily available, thanks to the wonders of the modern world.

1. Personality Tests

By the time you’ve gotten half-way through high school, you’ve probably taken at least one or two personality tests. The most common is the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator. While it works best when given, interpreted, and followed up by a professional trained to work with it, even a self-administered one can be eye opening. You can take various versions of it online, here’s one. Another, with a slightly different way of grouping the results (that I particularly like) can be found here.

Even the memes that float around on social networking sites can lead to some insight into who you are right now. Unfortunately, they’re so easy to produce that most of them are horribly constructed, bland, skewed, and shallow. Be aware of the source and try to gauge the depth of any meme that crosses your path before you put too much stock in it.

The important thing to remember about any versions of any personality test is that it is only an indicator of who you are right now. Tomorrow, you may be in a different mood and answer enough questions differently that your type will change by a letter or two. Nothing that these sets of questions spit out is set in stone–if we want to change who we are, we can.

2. A Video Camera

Most of us are visual creatures. We’re kind of built that way. Most of the meaning we glean from interacting with others comes from non-verbal cues. What better way to learn about ourselves than to get someone else’s view of how we behave?

Video cameras are cheap these days–many cell phones even have video capability–so this isn’t as far-fetched a tool as it once was. The trick is, you probably need someone to help out and a group of understanding friends who don’t mind being caught on tape as you interact with them. Alternately, set it up and tell stories to the camera.

No matter the technique used, the first few times you’ll be very self conscious, making that early data very flawed. When you get to the point where you forget there’s a camera there, though, you’ll be able to look back at the footage and see yourself in a whole new light.

3. Lists & Journals

Make lists. Lots of them. Write down the thought process you go through to make a decision. Write out pros and cons of what shows you watch on TV. Write stories of your day–no matter how mundane or boring. Eventually two things will happen: you’ll become more aware of the processes you go through on a daily basis and you’ll be able to shift your thinking to a more analytical level when looking at your own thoughts and actions.

Journaling can be one of the most productive things you can do when getting to know yourself. It provides a permanent record of what’s come out of your head before. You can flip back through the pages and see how you felt a week, month, or year ago. If you write about both your good and bad times, you can see the ebb and flow of your moods and start to pick out patterns.

Most importantly, going back and reading old journals and lists months or years later can really help you keep the drift of memory in check. Depending on our general mood, memories often drift either to the positive or negative, dropping out bits that don’t support the direction of the drift. When I went back and read my own journals from my teen years, I discovered many positive things I had completely wiped from my memory as I focused on how awful that time period was.

4. Friends

While it’s never easy to hear some things, we can always ask those around us how they see us. Real friends will offer constructive critiques of your good and bad points. Take anyone who only has good things to say with a large a grain of salt as someone who only has bad things to say. If you really trust your friends, you can ask them to point out when you start falling into certain patterns–like being argumentative after a bad day at work or being flighty and hard to understand when you’re excited about something.

Sometimes, just the act of asking someone what they think of you can be an enlightening experience. It can point out just how much we don’t know about ourselves… and how afraid we are to find out.

5. Professionals

Once upon a time, I would have never recommended a therapist, psychologist, or psychiatrist as a viable tool for learning about yourself. All I had heard were horror stories of people being put on medications, told how they thought was wrong, and, more or less, coerced into falling into “normal” patterns in order to be considered OK.

Years have passed since then and the world has changed. Many therapists are much more open to non-destructive personality quirks or beliefs and practices that fall outside of the norm (like minority religions such as Wicca or the behaviors of various sub-cultures like Goths or the BDSM scene). Even better, there’s a wider range of professionals available, so you stand a better chance of finding one who’s personality meshes well with your own.

Make use of one or all of these tools–or numerous others that are out there–and you’ll start to get a better idea of who you are right now. Once you’ve started to get a handle on that, you can begin to use your crushes as tools to delve into the depths of your emotional side.

As you flesh out your own view of yourself, two new tasks become important: deciding who you want to be and starting to figure out how to get there.

Next time, I’ll talk a little about some processes that can help keep everything moving along.

Tags: introspection, personality, Science

Despite my best efforts, I never was able to fully overcome all those little anxieties that had settled into place over the yeas before high school. They were always at their worst, though, when I was surrounded by the same people who had been around when they first formed.

The odd thing was, anytime I removed myself from the ordinary and familiar, I felt much more alive. Much more myself. Much more at home.

Key Club was the most common escape route. Every year there was a district convention that,  while it happened more or less right in our own back yard, always felt like somewhere foreign. Also once a year there was an international convention that took place well beyond the confines of my home county. I made it to four district conventions and two international ones.

Finding myself on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, surrounded by lovely young women was something I would have never considered possible during the first half of my high school career.

These were the places where I thrived.

At my very first district convention, I broke through a lot of personal issues and got to know someone who really did change my life.

Removed from my ordinary rut, I allowed myself to be more true to who I was. Without the worries of overcoming past impressions made, I was free to experiment a little, to try on who I wanted to be.

It worked quite well.

During that time, I managed to make a good number of friends, in the space of a weekend or so, that I felt closer to than people I had known for years. A few would surface again, when I was in college. Some of them I’m still in touch with–more frequently than most people I graduated high school with.

Fear follows us only where we let it. When I was within the walls of my high school and, most of the time, within the confines of my home county, I was steeped in fear and depression caused by years of emotional baggage. Traveling, being surrounded by a fresh batch of people, sharing a common “newness” of experience–those things let me leave my fear behind. For those brief weekends, I was free to discover who I actually was, deep down inside.

It wouldn’t be until years later–nearly half-way into my college career–that I would fully understand just how much I limited myself when I was on my “home turf”. The shock of returning to the normal grind after a convention inevitaby shot me into a depression that would block out most of what I should have learned.

But, during my darkest times, those bits of interaction–the quick crushes, the shared laughter, the adventurous exploration–would be beacons to keep me from falling too deeply too quickly.

With my descent slowed, I could always find a kind, local hand to reach out to.

Tags: high school, introspection, key club, lessons learned, travel

With my nearly three year long destructive crush fading behind me, I discovered I had a whole lot more energy to dedicate toward thinking about relationships with other people.

High school, with the plethora of pop culture mythology I had firmly loaded in my head by the time I started, struck me as the perfect time to explore those thoughts.

Unfortunately, reality proved to be far removed from The Wonder Years, Happy Days, and Some Kind of Wonderful (as well as a whole lot of other TV shows and movies I’d been watching a whole lot). I most certainly wasn’t one of the popular kids. I didn’t have a group of “adventuring” buddies. In fact, I barely felt connected at all to the people around me. Most of the time, it was more like being on an away mission in Star Trek–observe, but interaction can be problematic.

Not that I was stopped by problematic things. Heck, I’d spent the previous three years punishing myself in that crush… I was bound and determined to have high school be different.

And in some ways, it was.

My status as a more or less invisible man let me see people from many angles. That gave me some insight into what was going on inside the heads of those around me. What it didn’t do was give me any kind of clue how to apply that to myself or my interactions with them.

So I floundered about just like any high school kid does. Except I think I may have kept more excruciating mental notes than most.

The first thing I realized was how quickly I’d fall for someone. Without the fixation on one person, my attention jumped like crazy. Each and every crush was different. In some, there was a promise of adventure (yes, I fell for the “bad girls”). In others, a personal challenge (yes, I fell for the “popular girls”). And in still others, something that I’d later figure out was a feeling of being around a kindred spirit–someone who was as lost as I was an as actively trying to find their own way.

Mostly, though, I found that as much as a crush inspired me to action, my fears and uncertainties rarely let that inspiration become reality. The mental blocks were too large to climb over or push through. I’d get caught in loops of planning and miss every chance to execute.

Eventually, I figured out two things: 1) The more I looked at my crushes, the more I learned about myself and 2) if you can’t go over or through your barriers, you have to find a way around them.

The first realization led me, eventually, to engage in this blog project. The second realization led me to change the way I looked at things to the point where I could manage to not get hung up on the idea of dating.

Instead, I focused on the little things–like saying “Hi” and engaging in some sort of conversation. At first, that was very difficult. But when I saw an opening for conversation–especially if it was on a topic I knew something about or could help with–I’d take it.

I never got quite aggressive enough to get a lot dates out of that method (which is probably for the best), but it did let me help a lot of people out… and gave me the distinction of spending a good deal of time with some of the most beautiful women in my class and the one ahead of mine.

If nothing else, it was a good solid ego booster, which would come in handy to offset a lot of the other things that went on in high school, relationship-wise.

Tags: crushes, high school, introspection, lessons learned

As muddled as my mind was for most of high school, some things began to become clear during those years.

First and foremost, the idea that, among my peers, I was actually a worthwhile person began to creep in. That was mostly due to finally shedding the destructive crush of years prior and finding the wonderful support of a small handful of people who let me have a positive impact on their lives.

Yes, it’s true that unlike a lot of other people I know, I had (and have) a very supportive family. But in those teen years, especially for someone like me, that doesn’t count for much inside one’s head. In fact, I still don’t think that, no matter how meticulously I try to explain things, my parents even come close to understanding where I’m coming from half the time. Back in high school, there was no way you could have convinced me they would. But they were always there and they did do a damn fine job of laying some positive groundwork for me to (eventually) build on.

What mattered most was the people I spent half my day surrounded by. My classmates. The same people I’d spent the previous three years with. The same people who were mostly indifferent toward me–which was an improvement over the previous years. That bit of indifference, while painful and confusing at the time, turned out to be a fantastic asset in the realm of self-discovery.

With no one to talk to most of the time, I had a lot of time for introspection. As an extra added bonus, because I was often ignored by those around me, I got to see sides of people they didn’t often bring out in public. Mostly because they had apparently just forgotten I was in the same room. Other times, because I stood mostly outside of any given social circle, people would confide in me, knowing that their secrets were safe.

These factors came together to give me a much more well-rounded picture of my peers than most others ever had. I could see the strange interplay among and within the different groups. I learned where people became boisterous or sullen to cover up self-doubt, how  they deflected attention from certain areas of their lives they didn’t want to share with the world.

I had a front row seat to the back-stage of high school life.

Try as I might, though, it was still difficult to apply that same point of view to my own issues.

As time went on, I did get better at it. Running through scenarios in my head, taking note of my own fears and hopes, trying to overcome my shortcomings. It was a rough process–and one that wouldn’t even be close to finished until my second year of college (and that just opened up a new level of things to work on).

There were crushes and clumsy attempts at relationships–romantic and platonic. More often than not, I just sat back and watched and learned.

The most important thing I learned was that, no matter what, I was most certainly no worse off than anyone else. I had things to offer–ideas, poetry, insight–that really could change people’s lives.

Even if it was only for an instant.

Tags: growth, high school, introspection

I tend to make a big deal out of my time in high school.

How I make a big deal out of it has slid into different territory over the years.

As I’ve gotten further away from it, the distance has allowed me to appreciate it more. Continued “personal archaeological expeditions” into that long-ago past have lead me to revise skewed bits of memory and revisit lessons I didn’t quite read correctly back then.

Mostly, I keep going on about it because it gave me some good stories that serve as the foundation of who I’ve grown into.

As we grow from kid to tween to teen and beyond, different seeds are constantly planted. It isn’t until that first decade or so of life is over, though, that we really begin to take an active role in how they grow. It isn’t until our teen years that the big-deal seeds (planted by our families from the day we were born onward) sprout enough for us to actually notice.

Heck, it isn’t until high school that we actually know enough to even accidentally sensibly prune what’s growing.

When I started high school, I had more or less just finished up the most destructive two and a half year crush I’ve ever had. I was at or near the bottom of the social pecking order. I really didn’t have much to lose at all.

Yeah, I was depressed a lot. So much so that, looking back, I probably would have benefited from… something. Medication. Therapy. I don’t know. But I’m often amazed I survived. But it was pushing through those rough times (even if they were mostly in my head) that made me realize not just who I was, but who I could be.

Most of the time, if felt detached from the rest of my peers. I didn’t think we had a lot in common. I know that to be an incorrect perception now. At least when it comes to some of them. They were all going through crazy stuff–be it family related or internal conflicts similar to my own.

We were all lost and confused (as teenagers always are), and all around us those seeds planted earlier in our lives were sprouting, tangling us in emotional vines and obscuring our vision with contradicting conglomerations of trees and bushes.

In high school, we begin to prune back bits here and there–at first out of necessity, then, as we gain more skill, knowledge and understanding, with determination. By the end of those four years, many of us had cultivated a nice little garden of sorts.

Mine was full of spooky trees, topiaries that moved on their own and man-eating Venus fly traps, but, hey, to each his own, right? Those are the kinds of things I embraced. A little dark, a little twisted, but beautiful in their own way.

The important thing was, all those sprouted seeds had roots that dug deep into the ground. It was that base–that network of experiences and values–that kept everything from washing away when life’s little deluges would hit.

They kept the ground beneath my feet and let everything I later chose to plant grow strong.

Tags: high school, introspection, lessons learned