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Fear

I'm not trying to be manly, but I don't consider myself as the type who is afraid of a lot of things. I'm not afraid of heights, spiders, truck drivers, or even Germans.
So I'm not going to write a post titled "fear" and tell you all about any kind of standard fear (like my fear of dirty dish-water and how when I touch it, it triggers my gag-reflex). Nor will I pretend I'm great because I went skydiving on Sunday. Yes, it was completely insane. And no, I'll not soon forget it. And yes, I get sick on roller coasters but still thought this was a good idea.
That's not the kind of fear I'm talking about.

I do have one or two very real fears, though. I want to try to dig into one of them. We'll see how this goes.

I have a paralyzing fear of being like everyone else.

Anyone reading this, whether you know me well, have only met me in passing, or only know who I am because you stumbled upon this and have never met me in a face-to-face environment, should know that I don't want to be like other people.
It's not that I don't like other people (I don't, but that's not the point), I just want to be different.
I'm not talking about piercing my eyebrows and getting a boob job or anything - even though it'd look killer with my hairy body-front.
I don't want to get a face tattoo of the Chinese symbol for "Pigeon Turds."
I don't want to fight a bear just to prove that I could win.
I never want you to let me fade into the blur of people you've met and forgotten.

I want to be different by somehow fitting in.

I probably don't do a lot of the things that you do - or even that you want to do.
Those of you who know me well know that I don't drink/smoke/blah blah blah, even though I have plenty of friends who do any and all of those activities. It's partly because I just don't want to do them, but part of that reasoning is that I don't want to be like you.
I may like you a lot, I may love you like a brother/sister/girlfriend/wife/legally-sanctioned-male-partner, but I don't want to be like you.
I want to get along with you, share stories, emotions, and experiences, but I want you to always think of me in a good light and think about how I was slightly different from anyone you've ever met.
I want to be the one that got away for every girl I've ever met.
I want to be the guy that everyone looks back on in 20 years and says "I can't believe I knew that guy...I'd love to give him a call." And if you feel that way, do it. I'll remember you.
Every time you see me or talk to me, I want to be better than the last time you saw or talked to me. That could mean that, since you last saw me, I've been working out. Maybe it means I've been reading and have plenty of interesting things to talk about. It could even mean that I'm going to move away and want to leave you with a fond memory of me. Any of these things. I just want to be better than the time before.

(side note, I wrote part of that last paragraph in a blog-window about 3 weeks ago and just let it sit there. I couldn't decide what I wanted to say about it. I could write for hours on that topic, but I'm not going to. At least not right now...I try to make these semi-controlled free-writes; never more than 10 minutes of writing goes into these.)

To sum it up, I don't mean any offense by this, but I want to be better than you. And as a result, I challenge you to do the same.

This is all very hard to explain. By all means, ask me if you have a question about this. I'm very open to discussion.
But for realzies...we jumped out of a plane.

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