I read someplace that as you age you become more and more you. You shed the bullshit, the unimportant things, the things that never quite worked out for you and just become more and more you.
I see this happening to not only me now, but to a lot of my friends as well. The voices we used to keep in our heads seem to leak out a lot more now. The opinions that we would have thought twice about sharing when we were younger we let fly at every chance. And I wonder sometimes if this is a good thing.
I mean, not where I'm concerned, I know with my own things it's great. I am just becoming even more awesome. But with some of my other friends? The shit they say? The positions they take? Oh my god...they are insane. Do they even understand that they are saying that crazy shit out loud? Where people can hear them??
Okay, I'm kidding. Sort of.
There are times when I hear a friend say something and I think to myself, there is no way you can actually believe that. But then I look back over our years of knowing each other and I see the pieces that were always there. The times they said something that was sort of coming up on that opinion sideways. Just testing the waters. Now they are in full voice about it and I have to say, okay, yeah, I should have seen that coming.
And I kind of wonder where it's all going to lead to. Do we all reach that "You kids get off of my lawn!" moment where the people who distilled down to our opposites are just let go? Or will we grow old together yelling at each other about how wrong the other one is? I would guess there will be a mix.
A few weeks ago I went to look for an old friend on my Facebook list. I hadn't seen a post by her in a long time and normally this time of year she's fairly active. Well as a surprise to me we are no longer friends. That's why I wasn't seeing her things. We were never FRIENDS we were always friends and our politics have never matched up. I had noticed over the past few years that she was becoming even further away from center and my guess is she noticed the same about me. She just reached that "I can't even" point towards me before I reached it towards her.
Because I am even farther from center on a lot of things than I used to be. And I was pretty far away to start with. But as I've gotten older I've lost all of my tolerance, or pretend tolerance for hateful bullshit. I've become more and more aware of my lack of patience for people who treat others badly. And I've become much freer with pointing out the times I think someone is being an idiot. Though there are still times I try to just let it go.
I'm not completely firm in a lot of areas, I still think there is more of me to be discovered. And along those lines I have very little patience for people who are so sure that they are always right they cannot even entertain a different point of view. A closed mind cannot let in a new thought. And I cannot be around people who are unable to take in more information when it's available. Decisions change based on information we have right now. If you are never going to let yourself experience new information you are stuck. I have no interest in stuck.
So who am I now? What am I becoming as I distill down to pure ME? I'm kinder than I was when I was younger. I'm more open minded (that probably has helped with the kindness). But I'm also less tolerant of bullshit. And I have no patience at all for willful ignorance. Which is making sort of a weird mix right now. Though, I've never been able to abide by rudeness or stupidity so I should have seen this coming...
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