Perpetually Uncomfortable: Weekend Ragin' with Tolstoy

I wasn’t much of a problem child. Now, that doesn’t mean that my parents didn’t have their own unique set of parenting issues to deal with (I used to have anxiety attacks in unfamiliar grocery stores and cry whenever slow songs came on the radio), but for the most part, I took it pretty easy on them. I was quiet, kicked the diaper habit in a day and had only one public tantrum ever. Even as I hit my teenage years – those years that every parent seems to dread – I was pretty low-maintenance. I studied even when my mom told me to “just pick ‘C’” and was always more comfortable rereading Jane Austen novels in my room than doing anything crazy.

Chips

Now those times have changed.

Well, almost.

I’m not going to claim that I’m suddenly a mad rebel or anything, but I have started to go out of my comfort zone a bit. I think this is partially due to the fact that I’m just getting older, but it’s also because I’m slowly realizing that if I keep up my safe, slightly reclusive tendencies, I might regret it later. I don’t want to look back on my life and wonder what it could’ve been like if I hadn’t always just done what was comfortable.

As a result of this realization, I’ve begun to break out of my shell a little bit. Basically, this means that instead of sitting in my house and reading a book, I sometimes make myself talk to people. Or I just read books in public places.

Of course, being the hermitic person that I am, my best efforts to break out of my shell sometimes don’t work out quite as planned. Like a couple of weeks ago when I decided to get my nose pierced on a whim and then started to second-guess myself, made a pro-con list, and decided that maybe it’d be a better idea to buy a fake one and test-run it for a while. Or the multiple times that I’ve started reading at parties because I’m hardly a stunning conversationalist and talking to people wears me out. Or the Friday night earlier this month when I decided that the only thing I really wanted to do was drink a pot of tea and read some Tolstoy in my room.

So maybe I’m not crazy enough to be on “Jersey Shore” quite yet. And maybe I’m definitely okay with that. But hey, at least now there’s roughly a 10-15 percent chance that I won’t become a creepy cat lady.