Monsters From My Mouth

When we chance upon each other on the street, our faces colors up, rising us from the black and white faces of the hoi polloi. In that moment, the world pales and fades into nothingness and we kiss like newborn couples. When we go on our own way, shoulders brushing, the world blinks back into reality and we merge back into the facelessness.

It's sometimes almost silly and embarrassing the way we act in public but that does not deter us from what we do. But the same lips that deliver sweet kisses also pours forth monsters that I really am ashamed of.

Closer observation of my behavior suggests that the closer a person is to me, the worse the treatment they receive. Total strangers might irritate me, but I would not utter a word; my darling don't even need to anything to get an harsh earful. Funny though it might seem, it is really because I care, even if I might be totally misguided.

In the case of the stranger, even if he is detestable, I can't muster enough energy to give him negative feedback because I don't care what happens to him. Unless of course it is in my interest to do so (i.e reminding a queue-cutter that the line is behind me not in front).

When it comes to people I'm comfortable with, I sometimes say the cruelest things. Yesterday, I lamented to darling that he isn't *ambitious. He's such a easy-going, path-of-least-resistance guy that sometimes it frustrates me. After some thought, I realized that if he really were the ambitious type, I would probably never have fallen in love with him.

Or take my project teammate. He's an easygoing guy as well and I'll tease him mercilessly about his spelling errors, him being such a CS major etc etc. Of course I really meant it as a joke and my comments are really not personal. But my ill choice of words sometimes twists my meaning. Like when I said 'Let's get rid of that thing on the slide. It looks stupid'. After that, I was mentally banging my head against a stone wall for being so callous and insensitive.

I've always enjoyed my own frank way of interacting with people. That is until I found out that I'm really stingy with praise while being lavish with my criticisms. To those who've been on the receiving end, I'm really sorry. I think I should really try giving a proportional number of praises and criticisms according to how I really feel about a person.

The way I've been communicating have given me trouble in the past. I had felt so wronged and victimized. People who misunderstood me thought me, I quote, "arrogant", "a liar", "secretive". For years, the verbal backlash caused me pain and a lot of self doubt. Was I really good enough for anybody? If a person shows me a happy face, does it really mean he/she enjoys my company? Is there really something fundamentally bad about me? These doubts went against my own belief of myself as essentially true and frank. How could is be that I was thought a liar when all I ever did was try to be honest?

Barring the case where I have been deluding myself all along, I come to the conclusion that I had hurt them with my words and thus lost their trust without knowing it. Subsequently, each unexplained action interpreted in an unfavorable light; each wrong word was a mark etched against my character until all that can be seen is a marred and distorted image.

These monsters I unleashed taunted me for years and finally, finally, now I can banish them. But I can only hope that I can restrain myself from releasing them again.

* ambitious not in the I'm satisfied with my job and wouldn't mind being a janitor for the rest of my life sense but more like he wouldn't actively do things that might get him promoted.