I'm sure everyone has been told at least once that someone finds them "interesting". It's a common compliment (or insult depending on the inflection). What I find interesting (ha) about the word is how often it's flung around by people who typically lose interest fairly quickly. The average is about two weeks, in my personal experience. This is without my "gray rocking" or doing anything deliberate to sabotage the interaction. Two weeks but they found me OH so interesting.
As with anything that I've become desensitized to, there's one person who emerges that will say it. I feel guilty for my reluctance to accept what they say. I feel as if my hesitance is basically punishing them for the behavior of others. It takes a lot of mindfulness to sidestep my usual thought process and undo the general lack of emotion I feel; practice to allow myself to react with my true self, unhindered with the debris of broken interactions. I don't always have this mindfulness.
In this case, I have to acknowledge that this person has been in my life for years, not weeks. It's easy to not even look at that fact when responding and I'm not sure why I'm so quick to overlook the evidence. Perhaps, I feel safer in being forgotten, ghosted, unseen, and unheard. I think there's less responsibility in a series of ultimately meaningless interactions than when I find someone who means something. Someone of value who thinks I have value. Now, I'm suddenly accountable. I don't feel obligated, no, that's different. I feel that not upping my standards is a disservice to this person be it standards of how I behave towards others or how I treat myself (especially how I treat myself).
And that's a rather scary place to be, no?
This person I care about cares about me, so now I have to care about me. I've been getting better with that over time, yeah, but it's finally dawning on me how far behind the progress bar I really am. And that's not where he'd hope for me to be. It's not even about pleasing or making him proud. It's about honoring the care and effort he invests with an equal amount of mine. I'm not sure if I'm phrasing this the best, but I'm trying. And, the extra layer of scary is that I'm uncomfortable with putting care or effort into me. Partly because I was raised that healthy self-care is somehow selfish and therefore I can't even distinguish between healthy self-care and true selfishness. I have no line. Partly because there's still a lot more self-hatred than I care to recognize. I'm sure I have other reasons but those ones came to the surface the quickest.
I'm not going to get into what it feels for me to be cared about, that would be a very long writing that, in the end, would make absolutely no sense to anyone. I'm not even sure if this writing will make sense to anyone. A lot of us go through life yearning to be cared for and a lot of those same people don't want the things that go alongside of being cared for, the accountability. I'm no different, I guess, but I'm aware of the other side of the coin and I know I can't choose one without its counterpart. I don't get to invent terms as I go along as much as I'd like to think I do. Some things in life are the way they are and no spinning truly changes it, it only fogs up your perception.
All of this from a word. Interesting. Signs and other words echoing in my head now all pool into place on the bigger picture due to one word. Hrm. I wasn't blind to things, I was neglectful. I refused to see because it felt like pressure upon me. And it is. And it's a pressure I need to also place on myself. And it's scary. And I don't enjoy it.
But I somehow know it's worth facing.
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