Something odd that I noticed at four a.m., staring blearily at my phone as I beat level after level of Candy Crush, my anal retentive tendencies not allowing me to rest until I had lost all my lives: I’m really only good at things when it is in my best interests not to be. I’m not good at Candy Crush, and I had been stuck at that particular level for several days, but as soon as I promised to myself that I’d sleep as soon as I lost, I started winning. Over and over again. At first I was pleased, but as the sky lightened I began to despair. My eyes were burning, my arms were shaking, and I could barely see the screen, but I could not allow myself to stop until I had no other choice. By the time I finally lost my fifth life, it was time to get up and start the day. Those bright, addictive little candies swan under my eyelids for hours afterward, as if to mock me.

I will readily admit that this particular instance was my fault, but it is an extreme illustration of something that happens to me all too often. I only ever seem to excel at things when I emphatically do not want to.

I first really noticed this unfortunate talent in second grade. I was a latchkey kid, and kept mostly to myself, and because of this people tended to think that my apathetic silence was indicative of a sympathetic ear and a shoulder to cry on.  I was sitting in a park near my house, minding my own business, when an eighth grader I barely knew plopped down beside me and started to talk to me about her dreams for the future, her fears and insecurities, and her misgivings about entering high school. At first, I was silent in awe and terror, then in confusion, and then in sheer boredom. All I did was nod occasionally for fifteen minutes, but this was apparently all she needed.
She eventually finished, and thanked me for being a good listener.

“No problem, Grace!” I chirped.
“Oh yeah, what’s your name again?”

This has not stopped happening to me as I’ve grown older. People love sharing their problems with me, and it’s not like I can ask them to shut up when they’re talking about such sensitive subject material. People will come to me and confess that they’re hurting or abused or even suicidal, and I doubt that I can just sigh and say, “Another one?” Even my father used to tell me about his marital problems and issues with my brother until I asked him to stop.

A particularly outlandish example of this was during my stint at a psychiatric hospital, because I had become a tad suicidal myself and my family didn’t think that my death would be as great as I was under the impression it would be. Normally, I’d expect one of the other girls there to come to me, but no. Not at all. This time, it was an orderly, the same one who was responsible for my mental health and ensuring that I didn’t manage to off myself during my time there. He came in during his rounds on my last night there, and found me still awake and staring at the moon because my sleeping pills hadn’t kicked in yet. I made a generic comment about how the moon was out, and he invited himself beside me and started talking about how he had studied Greek philosophy and the anima and his misgivings about how mental illness was treated (way to instill confidence in the unstable adolescent you’re talking to) and how nerdy he’d been as a kid. (He ended up confusing Diana and Demeter, so I spent most of this conversation wondering whether or not to correct him.) Then he gave me a fist bump and said it was good to know me and left and I never saw him again.

As odd as that was, there was another, even stranger instance of this that my friends refer to as the “monk incident.” For my friend’s birthday, she invited me and a couple other friends to Medieval Times, a dinner and show where the cast interacted with the audience. I ended up catching the attention of one of the actors, who was playing a lecherous monk, and he spent most of the evening teasing me, and ended up subtly getting my number when he asked me to send him a photo that I’d taken with him. My friends informed me that, yes, he’d been flirting with me, and, yes, flirting back would be a terrible idea. I worked my age into the conversation as soon as possible, and then the conversation somehow swung to his failed marriage and his conflicted feelings for his ex wife before he ended up never contacting me again. I still like to tell that story at parties.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. I’m great with children that I hate, but terrible with children that I actually like. I only ever seem to attract anyone’s romantic attention before or very much after I develop a crush on them. I only qualify for things I don’t want to do, and I only ever get A’s on papers I don’t care enough about to work hard on. I once wrote an essay in fifteen minutes about the elements of art or something pretentious like that, and I was giggling the whole time because of how ridiculous it was. My teacher read it out loud in front of the class, and it wasn’t even my own. I was on lunch break and it was a completely different course. I got into my middle school geography bee while trying to answer questions wrong on purpose. Old people that I don’t know love me, but relatives that I actually like usually end up hating me. At a recent funeral I went to, I somehow ended up talking to the reverend about Greek classics for twenty minutes, while the people I was actually related to were busy catching up and having a good time, or at least as good a time you can have at a funeral. (When you’re Irish, everything’s a family reunion, regardless of whether or not the host is actually alive.)

I’m not sure exactly how to end this, because I’m actually trying really hard at this and so I’m destined to fail somehow, but the moral of the story is this: appreciate your talents, but only the ones you like. Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy it, and just because you enjoy something doesn’t mean you’ll be good at it. All that matters is that you don’t end up in the corner listening to someone’s hopes and dreams unless you actually want to hear them.