In short, Quote to Self is basically where I take a quote from a book I’ve read recently that I feel like applies to my life at the moment and I discuss why.
My last Quote to Self here
I will be discussing the Lunar Chronicles but there will be no spoilers!
Worldly, confident Captain Thorne could never be captivated by plain, awkward her, and she’d been disappointed by such wistful thinking before.
-Cress, from Winter by Meyer
If you haven’t read the Lunar Chronicles, Cress is a character that shows up in the third book and for the sake of this post, all you need to know is that she is a quirky, socially awkward girl who likes Thorne, who is a kind of a cocky, funny troublemaker type of character. Your resident bad boy except he’s not mysterious.
So for some unfathomable reason, I was so irritated and annoyed when I read this particular line although I really couldn’t put my finger on why it annoyed me so much. I mean, I’m harsh on books, but this line should not offend anyone in any stretch of the imagination.
But then I realized why it annoyed me so much.
It’s because, it reminded me of well, me.
Hold up, that escalated quickly. Let me explain. Let’s travel back in time..to my childhood specifically maybe 7-8th grade or even through high school… And pretend you could interact with anyone that knew me. Take your pick. You can talk to my sixth grade teacher with her bobbed brown hair and old lady glasses or maybe my then best friend who is the dictionary definition of a goody two shoes or maybe my middle grade archnemesis who came in the form a girl who for some reason found everything hilariously funny or the guy I had a crush on in high school who sat next to me in Spanish. Whatever.
There are two adjectives that they would use to describe me (besides my apparent niceness) and that would be
- innocent
- naive
And I would have hated it. Even though it was probably, actually very true. Since college, I’ve gotten comments like,
“Wow you drink?”
“You actually want to go a club?”
“I can’t imagine you at a rave! What would you even do?”
“Wow I didn’t know you could have dirty thoughts about someone.”
And I realized how different people’s perceptions of me are compared to my own perception of myself. I see myself as someone loving new experiences, other people see me as someone who never leaves the house. Being innocent and naive is not necessarily a fault, it’s probably just who I am, considering my lack of experience with the opposite gender and my lack of life experience in general. It kind of explains why that Cress quote is like a line that’s directly ripped out of my mind whenever I had unrequited feelings for someone because I would never have the guts to actually say I like someone to their face. But I think my annoyance at being coined “innocent” and “naive” is rooted in my deep seated fear of people treating me like I don’t know anything or being too fragile to handle the truth and not even knowing the things that I feel like I should know. It’s kind of like not knowing a swear word and you ask what it is and all your friends are like “whaaat?? you don’t what _____ means?” except that feeling is amplified. Sometimes I feel like I’m always one step behind people, as if my experiences in my sheltered world made me somehow less of a person even though it doesn’t mean that at all. And it leads to questions that I’ve been having a lot lately: Am I denying who I am? Why can’t I just accept that maybe I just am this way? Everyone says be yourself, but what if you don’t really “like” some parts of yourself and you want to throw those traits away and keep the others? Does that mean you’re not you? What if who you want to be is totally contradictory to who you are?
This bias really shows in my reading too. I tend to gravitate towards characters that are really not like me at all but I kind of want to be. I gravitate towards the more cynical, reckless, devil-may-care and worldly characters like Isabelle (from The Mortal Instruments), like Evie from (The Diviners), like sassy and reckless Sage (from The False Prince), like Cinder and Scarlet even though I’m actually a Cress.
Anyways, what are your thoughts on my identity crisis?
A Hundred thousand Stories 