je t’enseignerai
New lovers are nervous and tender, but smash everything. For the heart is an organ of fire.
Around whom do you like yourself the most? I’ve long held that we choose our best friends and most favored acquaintances based as much on who they are as who we are around them. Think about how you act around your best friend or your favorite friend group and I’d wager you just like who you are when in their company–they have that effect on you.
I think it goes deeper that simply “being yourself,” since the vast majority of us don’t have that figured out and those of us with a more well-formed sense of it still make decisions to scale back or magnify certain aspects based on who we’re around. So instead of exhorting each other to “be yourself” in uncertain social situations, perhaps we should spur each other to “be who you like to be.” Hmm.
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My coworker John is buying a new house. He’s friendly and has a habit of wanting to tell me all about the past day’s decisions and deliberations. Last night after Bret (my boss) left he was furiously crunching numbers and cobbling together Excel spreadsheets, trying to figure amortization schedules and equity lines and all manner of house-related ruminations. I’m interested but I’m not–I am because I want to familiarize myself with the jargon and the develop a certain mental agility, currently somewhat lacking, when dealing with financial matters. But at the same time he’s enthusiastically rattling off unfamiliar terms and I hesitate to make him pause every ten seconds to explain something. My house-buying experience was comparatively straightforward. He and Bret talked about it for a bit too, and I enjoyed seeing a conversation between two people with a relatively similar amount of experience.
I think that’s a fair statement. I suppose one could argue that if you like yourself, then you are being yourself, but you make a very good point that most of us don’t know who we are at least not down to the last details of it all… Very nice. Well thought out. I like it.
/es/\\e
I like myself around you.