Still Waters

I was a taking a personality test, one of those that gives you a one word or short sentence description and then you have to answer yes or no. Psychologists call them forced choice tests. It doesn't matter if the true answer is really neither yes nor no, because what matters is how you choose to answer it. I hate them. Very annoying.

So, this test asks if you are calm, yes or no. That's one of those, "Oh, sheesh, I don't know, neither one!" questions for me. Call me reserved if you want to be nice, or a wallflower if you don't. Either way, unless you are one of the people who is super close to me, you'll never know what's really going on inside me.

I've had people assume that I'm stuck up because of this, which always amazes me. It's the opposite. I'm shy because I'm not good at dealing with unfamiliar situations and I worry too much about doing the wrong thing. So I avoid new things, pretty successfully too. Far from thinking I'm better than anyone else I value other people very much. I worry that they won't value me back, is all.

Am I calm? Well, that depends on if you're looking at the inside or the outside. It cracks me up how people who know me, even good friends, are so easily astonished at what an emotional person I am, at what a naughty sense of humor I have, at how much I struggle to control my temper. It's like that duck joke, calm and serene on the surface, paddling like crazy underneath.