Boring

I’ve been feeling introspective lately. I think I used to feel that way all the time and now I don’t even keep a journal. I tried to do those 5-year journals to keep a record of my life, but I always get bored because nothing ever happens.

Someone that I thought was my friend recently called me boring and I had to fight back the irrational desire to burst into tears. I know it shouldn’t have hurt me. I have a feeling boring was not the adjective this person was searching for (I am not a tiresome, uninteresting person, thank you very much), but it’s still one of the meanest things anyone has said to me in a long time.  I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it either. Is my life boring? Am I boring? I know the use of the word boring automatically indicates opinion. There isn’t anything clinical or exact about referring to something or someone as boring. It is completely subjective. But I’m letting it get to me; one stupid word spoken by someone too selfish and emotionally immature to think before they speak. In this particular situation, the real issue came down to the question of how does one explain to an extrovert what it’s like to be an introvert?

For the first four months of this year I threw myself into finishing my novel. It’s the first part to a trilogy that I have been re-writing and re-writing for the past five years. I still have a ton of editing to do, but I feel that it is really done this time. And I feel remarkably empty inside like a piece of me has died. Everyone kept asking me this past week what I was going to do to celebrate and I honestly don’t have it in me to do such a thing. How do I “go out” and “do something fun” when I’ve become so accustomed to shutting myself off from the world all these years to write?

Perhaps I am boring.

Or, at least, my life has become so.

The truth is I get depressed when I don’t write. But I get depressed when I’ve been cut off from people for too long. And then I get overly touchy and moody when I’ve been around too many people for too long. This is the hardest part of being introverted. I know life is all about balance, and finding that balance is everyone’s greatest and most important journey. If we can’t find that balance then we’re never really living, we’re just treading water, hoping to stay afloat long enough for the tide to carry us to shore.

If this is how we are living, just barely surviving, waiting for life to come along and save us, I don’t think we’re going to be very happy with what is waiting on that shore.

I’m going off on a weird tangent, but basically this is how I’ve been living.

It’s getting old.

I’m ready for change.

Change that I make instead of letting life happen to me. We are all creators. We create our own happiness, or sadness, or anger, or worry. I want to start creating my own happy ending instead of waiting for it to magically stumble into my path. I suppose I could start with incorporating activities into my life that I find fun, not that someone else finds fun. I suppose I've lost sight of what I actually like to do besides sit at home on my weekends and write. I know it's going to take me a while, but it's a good place to start.