Going Under

The reason I hesitate to make friends is that on some levels its unsustainable. Acquaintances are all fine. You meet you talk you part. But when you start sharing your thoughts and feelings and vice versa there is this dependency that gets built. I sort of hate that after a point. I try very hard but I guess by nature I am sort of needy, and need to be needed, rather connectedly.

I love people, I love new people, and it makes me very happy to hang out with them. Even if they are sometimes obnoxious, I collect something to think about whenever I meet someone. Sometimes, actually most times, what comes naturally to me is to invest a lot of time in people I really like. This is a slippery slope though.

I think I get (mildly) psycho about this. Then I feel bad for being psycho like that. I feel super duper angry when they don’t respond in equal measure. Take the simple matter of correspondence. My husband for example will ignore all emails I write to him. It makes me furious because I would never do that to him. One day he told me that he doesn’t reply to my emails because I write too long ones, and he feels obliged to write back an equally long email, and he cannot so he doesn’t.

It sounded like hogwash to me in general, but I took something away about myself from that interaction: That my emails are too long. And something about my place in the world: No one cares for honest outpourings of feelings and thoughts and ideas and goals that are personal to me. This one is a hard pill to swallow, to say the least!

Nowadays I don’t bother to write long emails anymore, unless extenuating circumstances occur. I hate nothing more than writing something like that, putting my feelings and thoughts out there, so speak. I don’t know why I do it. And the addressee, such as my husband, doesn’t even acknowledge it? Oh I even hate talking about this. When I hate something its time to change it. So that’s a new resolution. It doesn’t affect way too many people at any rate but I hope it will make me hate myself less.

This reminds me of that phase of my childhood. I was in college, and it was all such a wonderful and new experience for me. When I returned home, I would tend to talk for two days straight. My sentences all garbled and jumping over one another, such would be my urgency and enthusiasm that it took me years to figure out that my family didn’t really care about this stuff.

When I really needed to talk to someone, because of the confusing business of having fallen in love, of course there was no one.  It felt like everyone disapproved and it was only my young age, and that rosy cloud you ride when you are initially in love that helped me carry on with my life back then. I did what I could and resolved my feelings through some analysis and so on, as best as I could.

Even though I am online a lot, it takes effort to pour my feelings out in black and white. Effort and time. Which are better spent elsewhere. Thankfully I don’t talk on the phone too much so that wastage of time is fairly minimal.  At any rate, it is time I channeled better and stopped wasting time on un-reciprocated thought-sharing exercises. It’s a hard realization because periodically people come into my life and it seems for a bit that I have an ear for my outpourings. And it feels great and I forget my past experiences in this regard for a little while.

But at the end of time it is just a false sense, a big fat lie. The truth is that I am forty (nearly) and its high time I curbed down my enthusiasm for life and the everyday living of it. And definitely high time I shut down the noise and drone of other people that runs in my head and tuned it to different, more peaceful, internal frequencies.

So you’ll find me over there in the corner, doing what I do best, marginally fictionalizing my day-to-day life. Playing to my strengths. One of which is an innate ability of fingers to fly on the key-board. And also, possibly going a little insane as a considerable amount of talking to oneself will likely be involved. If you try me online and don’t find me responsive, its not because I am too busy. Its because I don’t want to deal.