Book, meet cover. Don't judge it.

I work with a girl that, for the purposes of this entry, I'll call Gina.

Gina was the first to train me when I first started here, over a year ago. Within a week, I had nicknamed her "Office Nazi." She seemed like such a cold bitch.

By the time I'd been here a year, I'd learned a few things about Gina. She was ridiculously high maintainence. She was perpetually annoyed. She was violently insecure. All these things made me dislike her more.

Over the past several months, though, Gina and I have had a few things in common to bitch and moan about. Doing so, I learned that Gina had a decent sense of humor. She came off as hard and mean, but she really wasn't that bad.

Last week, I walked into my first History class to see Gina sitting in the back row, grinning and waving at me. During the break, I found out that she and I had a very similar sense of humor. We laughed at the same jokes from the teacher and thought the same things about our classmates. The next day, we started emailing a bit more frequently and a bit more comfortably. Our emails lost the workplace professionalism and took on something almost akin to friendship. Last night, I sat next to her in class.

I realized something this morning. I have always been told that I give off an aura of toughness - of "don't fuck with me or I'll cut you." I've been told over and over that I walk hard, talk hard, look hard - that I look and seem mean. I have always hated this. The reality is that I, myself, am violently insecure. This causes me to put up all sorts of guards and defenses that I guess relays as "toughness." I see now that Gina does the same thing.

In my "recovery" from my illness, and I'm learning and re-learning a lot of things about life, and myself. One of those things includes remembering that everything that happens is an opportunity to learn. When I first saw Gina sitting in the back of my classroom, my stomach fell. "Great," I thought. "An entire semester of feeling scared and insecure around this girl." But now I realize it's an opportunity to learn just one more damn thing about people and their layers. I judged this girl based on appearances alone, and now I'm getting my comeuppance for it by having to swallow my pride and admit I was wrong about her.

Damned if I'm not 21 years old and still learning to understand cliches. This week I met the book, after months of staring at the cover.

Comments

[theresa]

this is really a great post: superficially, your book, cover, judgement, thing really works well - while it's not incredibly original, you use it in a way that seems fresh and not-cliche...
the meat of the post is much more interesting: whether you realize it, or not, it hints at your truer self; your post just after that one is worrisome, but perhaps for reasons unlike the ones you listed. i won't play shrink on the internet; we'll talk soon.