How Boring!

Sometimes, life gives you the opportunity to sit down and contemplate your inner landscapes, specifically leading your eye towards the corners of your reality you fear the most.

I have long given a lot of lip service to the issue of how important ”authenticity” is to me, because anything less feels like a slow soul death. It’s not the spectacular crashing of a meteor; rather, it is the slow and sad death of a plant that doesn’t get enough any water.

But how authentically can we actually live up to "living authentically" in a world that typically doesn’t like it when we break ranks with the ”normal and expected” and stubbornly stick to our guns?

In the course of my years on this planet, I find that I have done pretty well in some aspects, and not so well in others.

Typically, when we depart from our truth, the culprit pushing us in the wrong direction tends to be our own fears.

We might be painfully well aware that we fear heights, or spiders, or jellyfish when we go to the beach, but there are subtler fears — often related to a sense of unworthiness — that rear their ugly heads and suddenly present us with ”gotcha!” moments, when we unexpectedly sit in them.

One of my fears — which, in retrospect, has periodically led me to lose touch with my authentic self — has always been that I am ultimately a very boring person.

I say that because so many of the things people typically interpret as ”exciting” and ”interesting” in life have typically held very close to zero appeal to me.

Historically, I have written that off either as a case of (some level of) social anxiety, or having been blessed with a brain and nervous system that gets very easily overstimulated, but those ”socially acceptable” rationalizations tell only part of the deeper story that those ”things” have simply never been interesting to me.

Does that somehow make me "wrong?"

In a world that loves to ”medicalize” anything that falls outside mainstream appeal, I have often been pointed in the direction of Social Anhedonia as underlying many of my experiences, with mainstream wisdom further insisting that it’s ”just a form of depression.”

• One, I am not depressed.
• Two, while I enjoy the company of others, I find it exhausting and often overstimulating, outside a close group of individuals, with whom my preference is to spend time one at a time.

Conventional wisdom suggests that we need to step outside our comfort zones — which I am quite content to do — but what is the point of repeatedly stepping outside our comfort zones if the feedback/reward is inevitably negative?

Another piece of conventional wisdom suggests that doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is a form of insanity…!

But, let’s bring the bunny back around and get back to the reality that — absent external criticism and expectations — I am actually quite content with my ostensibly ”boring” life. My boring life feels authentic, even if the greater world doesn’t afford me a (financial) way to stay in it, as much as I could wish.

Which brings is to one of the broader challenges of the world: Standing in your (well-examined!) truth in the face of your surrounding environment insisting that something is ”wrong” with you… primarily because those helpful critical voices are not capable of considering reality through any lens of perception besides their own.

It's ironic how a person can care deeply about the well-being of others and at the same time not care what the world thinks!

My own mother even insisted that I was "not very exciting" and tried to instill in me the fear that I would "never find a nice girl" unless I made myself more interesting, somehow. But if that weren't my authentic self, wouldn't that be disingenuous?

Just saying...

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!

How about YOU? Are there any uncovered corners of your sense of self you tend to ignore? Do you hide them away out of a sense of fear? Or something else? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2025.12.11 00:18 PST
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