It's a Simple Question, Right?

My name is Trevor
I asked a girl out.

So recently I found out that I have grown as a person. I say this because I only discovered it through a very difficult action that I took.

I got a crush on a lady, and decided to do something about it.

Some of reasons that I found this terrifying.

It meant that I wanted something so much I made a deliberate effort to obtain it.
It was me doing it. Not Trev's Shirt, not a character, but me.
General fears
I hadn't done anything like that in years

For some time, I have believed that I didn’t deserve good to happen to me. There are a number of reasons (excuses) for this which I won’t get into. Funny thing is, when you don’t believe good things should happen to you, your desire goes out the window, and when that happens, it leaves an opening for apathy to blow through.

Desire is not a bad thing to have. It can help to fuel your motivations, gives you something to work toward. It can help you persevere through the icky bits that life sometimes sends your way. Apathy, however, covers your life with a thick coat of “Whatever.”

This realisation that I wanted something, was like a snow plow, shoveling large amounts of “Whatever Wads” from my vision. And the path that it left behind was an open invitation to personal growth. The next step for me was to follow that path.

This brings me to the next point. It was me doing it. I have a future post in the works about the entity of “Trev’s Shirt” so I won’t get into that now. I also have a number of different ‘characters’ that I show the world in different situations. A great example of this was at work. When I spoke to my younger customers, I have been described as an “over-enthusiastic man-child”. Around my new customers, I was polite and informative (if somewhat quirky). Around my staff, I would show “The Boss”. I was different for peers, I was different for regulars. Most of these characters had an element of me to them (the greatest lies always have a kernel of truth), but none of them were me.

This needed to be.

That was important in its own right. I needed to show myself. I needed to portray me. For a lack of better words and at the risk of repetition, I needed to be Trevor.  So I did.

The trouble was, I was afraid of what would happen. Being an empathetic person (INFP for anyone who knows about Myers-Briggs), a lot of my fears were based around what I was doing to this lady (I also had the usual fears that these decisions and actions bring).

Most people I know don’t want to intentionally harm another person in anyway. Doubly so for anyone that I willingly spend my time with. By asking out this lady, I was potentially forcing her to cause pain in another person. She may have to reject me. We are afraid of rejection, and by we I mean people. A truly compassionate person would understand that when they say no, they are rejecting. It cannot be easy.

This was perhaps my greatest fear of all. That I would cause her pain by the simple fact that she may need to cause me pain. The humour of this horrible, roundabout way of this thinking was that no response would actually cause me pain. If she said yes, then sweet. If she said no, then I’m no worse off than when I started. In fact, I would have achieved a sense of personal growth so I’d be better off anyway. But she wouldn’t necessarily know any of this.

Cyclic thinking and reasoning is horrible.

For me, the outcome was positive regardless. I decided to go ahead with it. It was all very new to me. I hadn’t truly asked anyone out in over a decade. That’s a long time.

I wanted this to go well so I practiced. You could probably picture me, pacing around my dwelling, trying to get the wording right, like you see in all ‘those’ movies. I would pace around, thinking about what I would say, how I would say it, and worst of all, what would be the potential responses. I swear I came up with at least six responses for every way that I could think of asking.

I often babble. Can you imagine what I would be like, when it's me, I'm nervous and I want something to go well. I daresay anyone who kissed the Blarney stone that night got nothing. The world's useless babble was coming out of my mouth over and over without reaching any point.

I had an additional challenge though. I met this lady during a play that I was in. I was determined that this would not be a 'showmance' (a relationship that only happens for the duration of a production) and I was also scared of making this person feel awkward around me (we did have to work together after all), so I waited until the very last performance to “make my move” (I couldn’t even type that without stopping to do this finger quotations).

Why is it so hard to say: "I like you. I'd like to spend more time with you. Would you like that too?" Three sentences.

In the end, I did it in 1. All of my practice and rehearsals were for naught. I got nervous and rediscovered my 7 year old self. The extent of my asking this lady out was simple.

She asked me if she looked alright. I told her "You do, but I'm not the best person for that job because I've got a little crush on you."

I'm glad that's how it happened. After all of my stressing and panic and planning and theorising, after trying so hard to make it ‘me’ that was asking the question, it was.

It was the most natural way that I could have done it. It was me and in revealing that about myself, I was happy.

It wasn't smooth. Neither am I.
It wasn't clever and witty, neither are my emotions.
It was simple. It was pleasant. It was honest.

My name is Trevor.
I told a girl liked her.
I'm incredibly glad that I did.