ESOTERIC SUGAR, no thank you.

A former friend of mine told me one day, it was the year 2017, when things heated up between us:

"You are a babbler."

That hit home. I got furious, raged, felt insulted and all that jazz. But right she was. I tended to babble. Babbled a lot during the years.

Drummed around the bushes.

I realized that with me drumming the bushes I aggravated. Some people from my life actually couldn't stand it. I think because I wanted to be nice, instead of being friendly.

Difficult to become straightforward, to un-learn to be strategically clever, to take care of not losing face, to play a person.

What shocks me pleasantly, is when I meet folks who have none of those attitudes. You don't meet them on a regular basis. You can search for them and if you meet one, you better make sure, this person is not just someone in your head, not someone you create by wish as "being perfect". And then use him or her for bizarr self-empowering games.

How to un-learn to sell myself in word and speech?

With looks I find it easier. Aging helps and there is not much I can do about selling my looks, because the look won't sell any further than it did.

The less pleasant shock is noticing the contrast between what I took on as habit in expression and thinking and the plain honest human. I have difficulties to put it into words when I hit on someone in conversation, who does not lie. Who shows no tendencies to blabber.

No perceptible attempt to pull the wool over my eyes. To confuse me. No concealed statement. No acted interest.
Above all, no rhetoric. No hypocrisy. No tricks. No sugar.

Who do you know who can do that?

Being nice. A habit. If you're nice, you get ahead. A platitude.
A mendacity.

I have confused niceness with friendliness.

Being friendly without smiling. It's possible.
There's a difference between someone asking you something very uncomfortable. Or he asks you with inquisition, or with the mocking face that never takes you seriously. You feel the difference immediately.

But you become what those around you are used to being.

People rub off on each other in the way they act, in the way they appear.

This form of lying, I don't know, is it called "white lying"?, it doesn't matter, it is like an old familiar jacket. You put it on and go out of the house with it. It fits and it's comfortable.

People talk about the truth all the time.

But when you meet a true human, you don't necessarily get it.

When I supposedly have a "deep interest in the truth" (I blabber), and I ignore some ones efforts to address what I have only pretended is of importance to me, I deserve a lecture.

Where I invoke the wrath of the one who is also interested in my question, but he has to realise that I am not. I then use his anger as an opportunity to drag his own fallibility into the light. But I confidently ignore the question that was supposedly at issue.

Now, as nobody is without error, and everyone knows this, the question of "who is right?" becomes useless.