Dive deeper into your habits and why you do the things you do – you may discover some rad insight into your life.
I love keeping things secret. For example, my friend wanted me to watch Young Justice, initially I wasn’t interested. On a whim I watched all three seasons in three days, but I didn’t tell my friend until I finished.
One more: my friend was reading A Tale of Two Cities, so I decided to try and read it within a week before I saw him and not tell him until we met.
I will admit, this is a strange habit. My friends would agree and have asked multiple times, “Why do you do that??”. For the longest time, I didn’t know and never thought about it. I dove deeper into the habit while sitting on a plane (reading my friend’s thesis paper without telling him).
I believe I’m decent at reading people and interpreting their emotions – I can tell when someone is putting on a “show” or being truthful. So I perform this habit because I fuckin’ love genuine reactions, especially ones of happiness.
There’s just something about the reactions I get from surprising people that makes me feel good. There’s a difference between the response to you saying you’re starting to read a friend’s favorite book and their response to you saying “Oh, I just read the whole thing this week”. It’s the difference between them saying “Oh cool!” and “What the hell! Why didn’t you tell me?? What’d you think?”
I think I do this because growing up, I received a lot of attention (doctors, parents, family). When I was younger, I drew a lot and with that I received a lot of compliments. But when you don’t like what you create and people say it’s amazing, you start to question the truth behind compliments.
So I don’t like generic compliments or reactions, they feel forced and insincere. Over the years I unconsciously developed this way of getting genuine reactions and I think it’s awesome. My friends may not love it or understand it, but maybe this will help explain it.
What strange habits do you have? Have you ever thought about why you do these things? Dive deeper into your habits. Find out why you do the things you do. You never know what you may find out about yourself.
