Attending a conference with nearly 99% of one gender is almost crazy really.  There’s a reason man was created and I believe that reason is balance.   Having gone to this conference last year, I was better equipped to deal with some of the off balance threads that seem to weave themselves into an event like this.  I was able to be myself and not engage or involve with things that did not fit within the framework of my own being.   If you met me, then I hope you sensed this.  Oh, and regardless of what you saw, I was not drunk once at this conference. 

Shocking right?   Like I say, I’m a bit much for most.  Well, and loud but that’s a different story.

I’m an outgoing social person and I don’t have any of the social afflictions that seem to dominate an event like this.  It’s hard to know sometimes when someone is having a social “issue” or just not being as welcoming and gracious as you would like them to be.  This struck me the most when I received the following comment from a group of 4 women.  They met me in the hallway and we were talking and just having plain good conversation and one of them said:

“Thanks for being nice”

Now, I had heard other comments like “You’re taller than I thought” or “Wow, you’re clean” but none of them struck me like this one did.

I can’t help but wonder if the person who was possibly not nice to them even knew.  Did they have anxiety and forgot to take their meds, are they just socially awkward, or really were they just not very nice.  Is it possible that someone I met left feeling that I wasn’t nice?  I cringe at the thought of that.  

I do know it’s hard to have sunshine blowing out your ass at an event with over 3,000 women with the squealing, lights, chaos, walking, walking, walking, no meat eating, and vendors throwing packets of kudos bars at your head nonstop.  I know because my ass was holding a lot of sunshine to blow and even I may have been near empty a few times

If you share these social afflictions it might be even harder to read if they were also awkward, out of sorts, missing their kids, needing more meds, out of sunshine, needing a kudos bar to the head because the buffet clearly was not serving steak.  Again.  I‘ll never know what the other side of the story was.  I can only control myself and try to learn from every experience. What I do know is that if I’m in a group of 3000 women and if even one of them recognizes me and expresses admiration?  That’s a gift that I’m going to do my damndest to blow sunshine at. 

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