Just Be

Watch out kiddos, this is gonna be a deep one.

Recently, someone who didn't know me so well told me to, "Just be Anna." This was after I told a string of really inappropriate (and, honestly, not funny) jokes in front of a few people. I was pretty embarrassed about it. I felt like I let the dorky, loud side of my personality out to play when it should have been at home reading a book.

Since then I've been thinking about the idea of Being Me. Butting into a conversation with a funny-but-inappropriate comment is something I do with really close friends. It's NOT something I usually do in the middle of a meeting. I'm usually the silent note-taker in a meeting. So what happened??

Maybe I have just grown up and into a place where I'm comfortable with being more authentic in every situation. Maybe I was nervous in the meeting and my professional veneer was just too rusty to hold up in the face of nerves. Maybe I've learned that, as Kermit was once told, "People's is people," and everyone has the shared experience of being a person- with all the joy and pain that that entails- and that really makes us all friends at heart.

I don't know which one of these is the truth. Maybe it's all of them. In any case, while I'm chasing down zombies I'll be thinking more about how to Just Be Anna.