Question: What do you call it?

I don’t feel like a very interesting person. I wonder, does a person ever sit down and say to themselves, “By gum, I’m an interesting person!” or “People are fascinated by me and my antics.”

I tend to think that most people don’t think about this much on a conscious level, but on a more subconscious one, we definitely all worry about what people think of us. And it’s quite terrifying to think that we are boring to people. I mean, heck, we’re endlessly fascinating to ourselves, so shouldn’t we be that way to everyone?

Um, no.

We know this isn’t true, yet we persist in this delusion that other people will be as enthralled by us as we are, but honestly? They’re more into, well, themselves.

This isn’t meant to sound snarky or depressing: it isn’t. It’s just a reminder that after you’ve been to a party and you think you talked too much (you probably did) or said something dorky (always a possibility) most people will be too busy thinking about what they did or didn’t say at said event and will thus NOT be twittering about you the next day, scintillating or not.

How do we even define what an interesting person is? I’ve often heard nice people describing an acquaintance as “interesting” when they really mean something else but aren’t willing to say it aloud. Sometimes this is a euphemism for any or all of the following: different, weird, eccentric, strange, odd, goofy, bizarre, freaky, fill-in-synonym-here. I think that this is often the case with the word “interesting.” For fear of sounding mean, we don’t say outright that the person to whom we’re referring is strange; we just say they’re “interesting” and leave it at that.

But why? Why can’t we call strange behavior strange? Or odd habits as the oddities they are? Euphemisms abound in our culture: the “such a pretty face” to skirt around heaviness, the “nice personality” to avoid saying “he/she is not that good-looking in the conventional sense.” So too does “interesting” deliberately blur the lines between a compliment and an insult. Sometimes it really is hard to tell which one it is.

So here’s my question, would you rather be considered “interesting” or not? Interesting is not boring, but it opens up a Pandora’s box of possibilities. Are you willing to take those on, too?

I say, bring it.