These are the Things I Am

"Right here above the street

Watching the city span beneath

I couldnt help but feel like an outsider

Lifting up off the ground

Seeing for the first time now

This is where I became an outsider"

The Outsider (2004) by The Daylights

On Thursday, Dr Xavier (no relations to the founder of the X-Men) from the Psychiatry Department conducted a sort of informal lecture and group exercise in understanding the "self", communication and relationships for us, the outgoing graduating class. There's more than a hundred of us, so I fully expected the turnout to be abysmal (hey, you don't know my class and apparently, Dr Xavier didn't either). Personally, I wasn't very inclined to attend, but I did anyway because I knew most of my colleagues would either be out of the state by then or too inebriated to show. That's the sort of person I am. I feel responsible to help swell headcounts when they dip too low.

A total of six students - including yours truly - turned up. A seventh joined us midway.

We were treated to staple interpersonal heuristics like the Johari Window and Triangular Theory of Love, and did stuff like list down what we perceive to be our strengths and pass around a piece of paper so everyone else can tell me what they think are my positive traits. Mine came back with these,

Haha, hardworking?

We were then asked to compare this list with the one we wrote about ourselves, to see if there's any overlap. As it happens, my lists had none - which means that how I see myself is radically different from how everyone else sees me. I sort of expected this really since there's only one person in the room with whom I actually hung out to any degree of regularity at all (and even so, we are in no way close to each other). I worked briefly on a project with the bloke who wrote "You have brilliant ideas" - which basically translates to me being all talk and no action. True that. As for never poking my nose into other people's business; that's because I'm so self-centred that most of the time, I rarely even realise that there are actual people around me.

Still, I wasn't too surprised. These are the qualities I semi-consciously project for the general viewing public (or at least, want to be thought of thus). With the exception of being "hardworking", of course. That's so off-base that I laughed a kidney out the moment I saw it. And so did the Long-Suffering Girlfriend™ when I told her.

Then, we were told to make a 5-minute sketch on how we were feeling at the present à la art psychotherapy. This was what I handed in,

I inverted the colours for absolutely no reason at all.

Then, we were asked to talk about what we have drawn with the amount of self-disclosure we want to provide at our own discretion.

"Um, as you can see here, I've drawn a nice little house atop this hill and all around, it's a sunny, blue day with few clouds," I explained cheerily. "And down here, a raging forest fire is consuming the countryside with huge columns of black, charry smoke rising into the sky."

So yeah.



P.S. This is a scheduled post. By the time you read this, I'm already outside of Malacca.

Diagnosable,

k0k s3n w4i