hate blogging about relationships, I’m not an expert. There’s something I need to get off my chest. Stuff I’ve realised over a period of time. About me. I remember taking one of those personality tests when I was younger and the psychometric person said to me that I like finding solutions.
I don’t know how to fix anything. Not a meal. A piece of clothing, a chair…
Yet I’m a chronic fixer. At work when there is a mess somewhere and I can try to figure out how to figure it out I’m on it. Of course this rolls out into other parts of my life. I question everything and I try to make sense of everything, and I also tend to forget very little. A gift. A curse. Me. My brain is constantly racing, is it a wonder that sleep hates me? And I hate that sleep hates me!
But that’s not why I’m blogging. In the last few years I’ve lost a lot of friends and family. Mostly because there are some things I didn’t understand because I’m not like that. I was projecting my personality, me, onto everyone else.
So I want to save the world, and everyone should want to do that too. When something bad happens to me, I want to be alone and I don’t get why the world would want to comfort me. I’m very bad at comforting people because I don’t want to be comforted!
It kind of hit me earlier this year after I read Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eye. But it still was one of those things that I got on the surface but didn’t really internalise.
I am, i would like to think, confrontational. I’m not the kind of person who let’s things go without thoroughly threshing them out and I have people in my life who dance around issues and pretend that things didn’t happen.
I would rather hurt a friend with the truth, than lie to protect them. And when a friend, or a person who I thought was my friend, lied to me it really cut me deep.
I know a lot of girls feel betrayed by their girlfriends when this happens. But do we ever ask ourselves what kind of person that friend/aunt/brother/sister/mother/boyfriend is?
A person (a Toni Morrison moment) will love like their character. A person who is weak and has no backbone is not going to stick around when things get tough. A person who is not honest with themselves, will not be honest with you. People love like they are.
So, I stepped back from me. For a minute and I looked at the people in my life. Not out of anger or a sense of betrayal or whatever. But I looked at them, the way they had shown themselves to me over the years and I realised, I expected too much or maybe too little. I expected people who were coming from a totally different place from me, to be like me.
I wanted something that I would have given in that situation. I thought myself better, stronger and more honest. And maybe my loud in your face and let’s get this over with part of me isn’t for everybody. Some people shy from confrontation, and it’s cool. It doesn’t mean they are any weaker, they just as not adept at “hurting you now to save you later” and I think I’m just done with trying to “fix” them to be people that I can accept in my life. Because really, the truth of my selfishness is that I want everything in my world to fit into who I believe myself to be and I don’t think I want to change that. Not yet anyway…
