06-19-2011, 03:51 PM
Stage 3 - AM 2011 - After 1 week
There's definitely signs of change.
I've noticed it before in passing but passed it off as due to the topic being one I was more familiar with. I'm much more willing to create an opportunity to voice my opinion in a discussion rather than just waiting quietly for an opening to present itself.
In discussion group/class, I would never often open my mouth to speak. A few weeks ago, I just started to speak up without waiting for the facilitator to notice that I had tried to speak before someone else and asking what I was going to say.
Of course, I'm starting to worry a little that I may be a little more vocal than I should be. Nobody seems to mind, yet, but when I start gently correcting people without thinking about it, I think that eventually people will be upset about it. Fortunately, I seem to have stopped correcting simple grammar and pronunciation issues (which I had a bad habit of doing for a long time) and have moved to gross inaccuracies. It has to be misinformation or something that will cause a misunderstanding before I auto-correct it. And I'm doing it more gently than I used to with the pronunciation/grammar.
If that's the trade-off for ending a really annoying habit for one that seems solely designed to benefit a discussion, I'm ok with that.
I'm also way more comfortable joking around with almost total strangers. I met some people at a party last night who work with a guy I used to work with and I was giving one of them a little bit of a hard time about the trouble she was having with choosing a song in Rock Band. She'd obviously never played the game before, and I would tease her a bit while helping her to see what she had to do. She seemed to relax more with the teasing than when I was just showing her what she would need to do to progress.
Also, a woman who I have been friends with for a couple of years and almost started dating has been more friendly towards me lately. It disappeared because she basically all but said she wanted to be more than "just friends" followed by me seemingly ignoring that and continuing to treat her as "just friends." Her attitude towards me cooled off quite a bit after that. She pushed me even farther away than before we started hanging out together as friends. Over the past month, she's suddenly warmed up to me again and started treating me somewhere between before she said something and around the time she brought it up.
I'm pretty happy about that. She's an amazing woman, and I didn't respond originally because I didn't think I was ready to be who I thought she wanted me to be. (This was around the time I was in the play and caught a glimpse of the potential me. I thought that she wanted the guy on the stage, and I didn't think I could be that. It's another part of the reason I started my search that led me to AM 2010 and eventually to AM 2011.)
Not bad for just a little over 1/3 of the way through.
Some trouble sleeping again, and really intense dreams when I do sleep, but that will likely clear up in the next day or so if the pattern from the first couple of stages continues.
There's definitely signs of change.
I've noticed it before in passing but passed it off as due to the topic being one I was more familiar with. I'm much more willing to create an opportunity to voice my opinion in a discussion rather than just waiting quietly for an opening to present itself.
In discussion group/class, I would never often open my mouth to speak. A few weeks ago, I just started to speak up without waiting for the facilitator to notice that I had tried to speak before someone else and asking what I was going to say.
Of course, I'm starting to worry a little that I may be a little more vocal than I should be. Nobody seems to mind, yet, but when I start gently correcting people without thinking about it, I think that eventually people will be upset about it. Fortunately, I seem to have stopped correcting simple grammar and pronunciation issues (which I had a bad habit of doing for a long time) and have moved to gross inaccuracies. It has to be misinformation or something that will cause a misunderstanding before I auto-correct it. And I'm doing it more gently than I used to with the pronunciation/grammar.
If that's the trade-off for ending a really annoying habit for one that seems solely designed to benefit a discussion, I'm ok with that.
I'm also way more comfortable joking around with almost total strangers. I met some people at a party last night who work with a guy I used to work with and I was giving one of them a little bit of a hard time about the trouble she was having with choosing a song in Rock Band. She'd obviously never played the game before, and I would tease her a bit while helping her to see what she had to do. She seemed to relax more with the teasing than when I was just showing her what she would need to do to progress.
Also, a woman who I have been friends with for a couple of years and almost started dating has been more friendly towards me lately. It disappeared because she basically all but said she wanted to be more than "just friends" followed by me seemingly ignoring that and continuing to treat her as "just friends." Her attitude towards me cooled off quite a bit after that. She pushed me even farther away than before we started hanging out together as friends. Over the past month, she's suddenly warmed up to me again and started treating me somewhere between before she said something and around the time she brought it up.
I'm pretty happy about that. She's an amazing woman, and I didn't respond originally because I didn't think I was ready to be who I thought she wanted me to be. (This was around the time I was in the play and caught a glimpse of the potential me. I thought that she wanted the guy on the stage, and I didn't think I could be that. It's another part of the reason I started my search that led me to AM 2010 and eventually to AM 2011.)
Not bad for just a little over 1/3 of the way through.
Some trouble sleeping again, and really intense dreams when I do sleep, but that will likely clear up in the next day or so if the pattern from the first couple of stages continues.
