Recently at an event I was holding forth as I so often do. A woman I had never met said quietly, “You’re funny.” I acknowledged the comment in the affirmative.
“No, you should be a comic.”
“I have been,” I said as I continued my conversation with someone I had known since grade school.
“No, you should do stand-up.”
“I have,” as I again traveled down the storytelling path I was on.
Then a school friend in the group spoke up, “Heather’s always been funny. That’s what I remember most about her from school. She would walk up and say things that made people laugh or observed behavior and put a spin on it. She was always funny, but she was kind.”
I was stunned and asked a few more questions because I had never known that I was seen that way when I was a kid. I knew I had a sense of humor; it was a requirement at our house to be funny and to laugh, but I had never had a contemporary from those years reflect that aspect of my personality back to me.
We moved a lot when I was a kid and I landed in 5th grade in Arizona and to put it in comedian language, it was a hard room to work. I did not fit in, but it would take me years to realize that it had a lot to do with my spending my life with adults rather than kids. Over the years I have attended reunions and been remembered for being smart, which is lovely, but never for being funny and kind. What a gift!
This woman had no idea the impact of her simple observation. In the blink of an eye, she handed me back a piece of the jigsaw puzzle. My realization is that we are all just trying to get through this life figuring out who we are. We create a persona as we wander through. We become our grades, then our jobs, our relationships, our outward appearance, our achievements, but who are we really?
What was lovely about the gathering is that there was a smattering of us who had gone to grade school and high school together. People you met long ago but you met them before they had constructed all the walls of their ego built from hurts, achievements, life lessons and fear. We had all known each other under the radar as I like to think of it, when we were just kids trying to get through the day.
As we do that, we drop breadcrumbs along the way. Aspects of our personality we believe we must discard or hide to fit in or belong. Mistakes or errors are made, and we wall up those moments for fear of being judged. Soon we live in a structure made up of misperceptions and shame or guilt. Then if we are brave enough or lucky we begin to retrace our steps and follow the trail back to our real selves. It can be a daunting journey, but if you stay the course you just might find out that when you could only see what people did not like about you, someone saw the you that was funny and kind.
