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“I was a little excited, but mostly blorft.– “Blorft” is an adjective I just made up that means ‘Completely overwhelmed but proceeding as if everything is fine and reacting to the stress with the torpor of a possum.’ I have been blorft every day for the past seven years.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants
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“Blorft” Had you ever heard this word this before you just read it here? I wish I had made it up! I am fond of making up crazy words, but I think this one will resonate with quite a few of you out there.
How often have you felt completely overwhelmed, or anxious, yet continued to act as though all was well? Have you done your best to convince yourself that your world, or certain occurrences within it, are fine with you, when they are really not, and when you are internally unhappy, or even miserable about them?
What is the toll it takes on you, and on others around you when you do this? It consumes a vast amount of energy to keep on play-acting, and to maintain a facade.
I have known a few people for whom this was the default behavior. At first, it fooled me. I admired how cool and collected they seemed to be, and how, no matter what was happening, they smiled and didn’t seem to ruffle, or to acknowledge any difficulty. As I got to know them better, I saw that wasn’t true. If you hung out with them long enough, and often enough, you could usually watch the facade crumble, till it lay at their feet in jagged bits and pieces. Slowly their real dissatisfaction and/or anxiety and high stress level began to leak out.
Eventually, the folks who spend a lot of time and effort pretending to be who they’re not, or pretending to feel what they don’t, will fall apart, implode, or explode. The damage they do to themselves can be severe. The damage they do to their relationships with others, can be pretty great. People tend to be wary of those they just can’t read or can’t trust. They don’t admire an artificial aura of competence, serenity and unflappable nature, when they discover it isn’t genuine. Sometimes they don’t even admire these qualities at all, because being around them makes THEM feel inadequate, but that problem belongs to them and isn’t what we are talking about here.
So what makes people engage in this type of artificial behavior? Is it a fear of confronting their own true feelings? Do they imagine that if they allow themselves to display how overwhelmed or stressed they feel, they will never again regain control of of their emotions and/or environment? Is it the fear that people won’t like them, if they show who they truly are underneath the smiles, and the professions of having things all together?
Maybe they are simply trying to pretend as a technique to change their own thinking. Sometimes that does work, if we give ourselves enough positive messages for long enough, so that we begin to get rid of our negative beliefs. We can learn to employ some methods of reprogramming our conscious minds.
It is more often, though, a learned behavior by some individuals, and a pattern of repressing their emotions and responses because they are indeed, fearful of the consequences, whatever they imagine them to be, and have convinced themselves of.
“Blorfting” then, can only work or be a coping mechanism for so long, without having an affect on your overall health and well-being.
In his blog, “Single Dad Laughing”, ( http://www.danoah.com/ ) Dan Pearce says, “Share your weaknesses. Share your hard moments. Share your real side. It’ll either scare away every fake person in your life or it will inspire them to finally let go of that mirage called “perfection,” which will open the doors to the most important relationships you’ll ever be a part of.”
So now that you have learned a new term, “blorfting”, I hope you will relegate it to your storehouse of worthless info, and will make sure it isn’t a behavior in which you have made a habit of engaging.
Certified and Credentialed Coach, Iris Arenson-Fuller, PCC, CPC, is a Life and Grief Transformation Coach, Life Reinvention Coach helping people (mostly midlife women, widows and Baby Boomer women}create a better present and a more promising future, no matter what they have been through in the past. She also has many decades of experience in Adoption Loss and all adoption issues.
