30 Day Blog Challenge Day 6: Three Personality Traits I'm Proud Of

This is day six of my 30 day blog challenge and this is the topic so far with which I'm the least comfortable. I was raised to believe we should be humble and not brag on ourselves, and this feels a lot like I'm doing that. But I guess I can look at like Unferth's taunt in Beowulf. It's not bragging if I'm just responding to something. So here are the three personality traits that I feel best about:

1. I'm humble. I know it's kind of ironic to say I'm proud of being humble. Actually, it's not kind of ironic. It's completely ironic. It's positively oxymoronic because once I say I'm proud of being humble, I'm being un-humble, which is prideful. And when I think about being too proud, it's humbling. Trust me, you don't want to be in my head. It's a weird place. At any rate, I feel like I am a humble person. My faith teaches me that none of us is any better than anyone else. Who I know or what I do doesn't make me special. I'm struggling like everyone else and that helps me not to look down on anyone. It's easier not to look down on someone when you're not above them.

2. I have a good sense of humor. I feel like I might look at the world in a slightly bent way. I always have a take on something and it's often seen by my friends and students as humorous. It's weird that I've struggled in real life to be funny on purpose. I just say stuff that I think and people laugh. Sometimes I'm actually surprised when they do. I don't necessarily intend to be funny. I just think it and then I say it and then people laugh. That's when I realize it was funny. The same thing is true when I write stuff. Sometimes I'll post something on Facebook or put it here in my blog and all the responses are about how funny I am. Well, I didn't put it on there to be funny. I just put it on there because that was something I thought of. It's not that I think it's not funny. It's that I didn't think about whether it was funny at all. So, over the years, I've finally just figured out that I have a good sense of humor. I don't know--maybe all people that people think are funny figure it out in the same way.


3. I'm creative. Yes, it seems almost silly to say coming from an author. But lots of people who write aren't necessarily creative in the sense I mean it. They write in a matter-of-fact manner about true things. Not to say that's not an act of creativity at all, but it's primarily an act of research and technical understanding of words and sentences and paragraph construction. Writing fiction is about technical understanding too, but I feel like it's more about imagining people and events and outcomes. It's taking a situation that already exists and, rather than describing it, I ask what if. What if she responded in this way? What if he is lying? What if another character walked by right now? What if this is a world where beings from another planet have already openly come to Earth? And the story gets built from there. With one what if after another.