hurricane.

 image credit via: pacific rim wikia

Seven years ago, when I was deliberating on a 'cool scene name' (I had that phase, don't kill me) - I was debating between going with alliteration or the usage of a poison. I liked poisons, if only because the oddest things were poisonous and I was discovering my own allergies and wondering why shellfish gave me weird rashes. I had a strange fascination with poison and how the most basic household items were poisonous (don't drink bleach kids, or eat soap). As most people can tell, I went with the latter - my current online handle of 'HannahCyanide' stemmed from there. I stuck to it for seven years, which is amazing. I also think 13 year old me had amazing music taste if an off-key voice.

The other name I wanted was Hannah Hurricane, while cool - probably wouldn't have worked too well in my favor. Also, a lot of people used hurricane in their name - either out of a devout love of Something Corporate or that one quote from 'Looking For Alaska'. If anything, I maintained being a hurricane as a sort of personal philosophy.

Initially, being a hurricane stemmed from wanting to cause as much rampant destruction as possible. All the great hurricanes were named after women due to our emotional rampages as a gender. I created and left chaos wherever I went, and that lasted me a fair bit. That's how I gained my current name, Medusa - due to the chaotic form of heartbreak I incurred in a series of boys during my stint in Hartamas. Apparently, people don't bounce back very fast from my relationships with them, it takes some time to recover and during this period, they're essentially turned to stone. Carbon-frozen versions of themselves, devoid of any and all emotion than the one they're feeling at that particular moment and they stay like that for a month or so, until they pull themselves together and find either themselves or another girl. I've stayed friends with most of my exes and while I'm normally not around during that period of time, people tend to gossip a lot and I end up hearing about it anyway. My juniors don't hear about this nickname as I usually date around my year or above.

After that, however - I strived to be like a hurricane in a different aspect. Drama may happen around me or about me but I'd like to stay calm. The eye of the storm if anything. I realize now that I don't have the best control over my emotions - most people know the story of me losing it over something a classmate said to me and throwing an oversized pair of fabric scissors at his head. Five years later and people still know about it and worry about my temper. It's mellowed out mostly, I've gone from making projectile weaponry out of stationery to physically assaulting people to screaming loud enough for half of campus to hear to having nuclear meltdowns to just... well, ranting online. Which I find seems to be perfectly acceptable, socially. It's a lot less to deal with, unless you follow me on Twitter - then you'll just be lambasted by a barrage of fluctuating emotions. You can probably use the Serizawa Scale to talk about my emotions, just measure how many tweets I use to talk about it, the frequency of the tweets, etc.

Today, Rico summed it up for me in a very simple way for me. He's good at that, he helps me take the mess that's inside my brain and distill it down to a baseline. Once that's established, I can put everything else in order.

People are either waves or rocks. Two distinct types of people. Got that? Okay, now try throwing something big at them (not literally). If their first reaction to drama is some kind of cautious but flat "Okay..." then they're rocks. If their reaction is more along the lines of "Whoa, wait. Why?" - then they're waves.

Rocks are people who don't let the outside world bother them too much. It takes a lot (or the information to either concern someone close to them or come from someone like that) for something to bother them. They have ironclad defenses. You couldn't find someone better defended than if they had concentric walls built around them, 10 feet high.They don't adapt too well though, and that usually doesn't bother them. They either watch the drama or they're that one friend who can still keep their heads on straight when everyone else is flailing like a bunch of headless chickens.

Waves are people who let things get to them relatively easily. Outside factors bother them immensely. They're the type to let an insult get to them and then get all riled up because of it. However, they tend to be more fluid and adaptable when it comes to situations - they process information relatively fast and try their best to adapt to that. They're the first group of people to react to a situation. Drama tends to center around people like this.

The question is: which one do you think you are? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter.