I’d like to start off by saying that I hate conflict. Wait. Do I? See, that was some time ago.

There was a lot of conflict around me when I was young. I didn’t understand it and there were no attempts made to help me understand it. Not that I could of. Somehow my natural reaction ended up being casually stepping around it.

At some point my solution came to be taking the workload on myself and silently fixing the problem when nobody was looking.

What about personal conflict? I seem to have developed being amiable, compromising, and telling people things that I think they want to hear. I suppose these are all viable tools, but I sense a pattern.

More often these days I’m aggravated by listening to people talk and cause conflict myself by calling them out on what they’re saying. I’m still reluctant to do it full on. I worry that they’ll take me for a jerk, even the ones I’m close to. This isn’t set in reality. It’s me a decade ago in high school, building reactions to bullshit social patterns that were common at the time, but set pretty squarely in adolescence.

This is good. A lot has come up and out, although there’s been a bit of backscatter. I suppose that’s inevitable, and while I’d like to point and yell “see!” it’s not what I was thinking it was.

This is all very hard work. I’d rather build a picnic table again, which was yesterday, but I know that’s not getting me anywhere. I know this too will pass, like the tribulations of the past. What a view.