Brave #4.

On meeting me – especially if we’ve corresponded for any length of time – you will likely not realize how incredibly shy and uncomfortable I’m feeling. In fact, when I tell people that I’m often shy, they raise their eyebrows or laugh.

Perhaps it is the purple hair? The nose stud? The fact that I don’t look like a wallflower?

At any rate, I have a hard time making conversation without that little voice inside my head shouting, “YOU SOUND LIKE AN IDIOT! SHUUUUT UP! SHUUUUUT UP!” even when all I’ve said is my name. I will either begin to babble almost incoherently about absolutely everything or I will have a hard time responding to simple conversation.

But.. once I’ve met you in person once or twice I turn into a social butterfly. I chatter (on and on) and I hug people and I snort while laughing and, with few exceptions, I become completely comfortable. This is good. I like when that happens.

My brave thing for today was speaking to strangers. I try to do this on occasion, but today I decided to do it very intentionally.

As we pulled up to Home Depot for the 800,001th time this week, I spotted a woman standing out front in the loading zone waiting for someone (her husband, I assume) to arrive with a van. She had a big stack of laminate flooring and underlay on her cart and I immediately wandered over.

“Is this your first time installing laminate?” I asked.

“Yep!” she cheerfully responded.

“Wheee! It’s SO MUCH FUN!” I giggled.

And then I began to tell her just how much fun it is – because it IS fun! The ‘click together’ aspect makes it easy and fast and, in my case, Coffee handled all the fiddly cutting and shaping around the edges and corners. And whoah, it looks good.

I told her that I like to stand in the middle of the room and be giddy with how beautiful it looks now that we’ve put in that flooring (and the new paint and the new toilet and the new baseboards, too). She asked if I was serious and I said that I most definitely was – it’s FUN.

Then she told me about the renovations they’ve been doing and how it’s been going on since spring.

Renovations expand to fill up your time. This is a simple fact.

Anyway, that was a surprisingly good interaction with a complete stranger. I spoke to a few other people in the store, too, with less success (not that they were unfriendly, but we just didn’t connect with the same glee as the laminate-lady) but I still felt pretty good about my bravery.

This being brave thing isn’t so hard once you get started…