“Do you know the difference between children and adults? It's how much is received versus how much is given. Humans as children simply receive without any conditions, and then they take all that they've received and in turn give it out when they become adults. Those who never received can't give in return. No matter how mature they appear, they still remain a child, wanting only to receive. You never received much before, so you only receive from yourself and give to yourself”
in the ~7 weeks since i moved to sf i have made exactly 1 new friend outside of work, let’s call them G. the second time we meet, G mentions how their parents were abusive and how G wants to make sure their kids are given the kind of care G didn’t receive. G tells me they have a lot of love to give and are looking for people who will receive it well
i admire the sentiment but it’s one that’s difficult for me to resonate with. pretty much everyone i know who had a bad relationship with their parents struggles with giving and receiving affection in some significant way (or at least this seems to be true of my close friends, and i don’t know other people well enough to be able to comment on their situations). i don’t think this stuff is permanent or impossible to change, but i do think it takes a lot of time and effort to do so, and i want to ask G how they did it
G mentions i’ve been putting up barriers during our conversations. that much is certainly true, though neither of us can articulate what those barriers are. it has long been in my nature to ask questions about other people instead of offering answers about myself - a mix of genuine curiosity about other people and subpar speaking skills, i think. i spent my last year of college tending to an a cappella group and a living group and various other communities and somehow managed to do so without revealing a single thing about myself (this wasn’t intentional, to be clear). i wonder if that’s also what i’m doing right now, at my job
sometimes i crave intimacy and care from other people, and sometimes when those things are offered to me i reject them. i don’t really understand when or why this happens yet. a first-order approximation is that i tend to get bored when i spend too much time around people, so i end up in cycles where i desire closeness when i’m not bored and pull away when i am and repeat once i’ve had enough time away. this is a gross oversimplification and boredom is not really the right word to use here, but i don’t have a better way to describe my behavior at the moment
i think the point of long-term relationships (relationships not being used in the romantic sense) is that you’re not actually supposed to become bored, because a) there’s always more to learn about people, even those you know very well already b) you can change the way you interact with someone if a specific kind of interaction is becoming dull c) some experiences are good enough that you should be content with experiencing them over and over even as the novelty wears off. somehow i’ve managed to fail spectacularly at actualizing any of these points even though in theory i agree with all of them. i don’t know what i’m doing wrong
recently i had an issue where, for no particular reason, i felt very uncomfortable and found it hard to be myself around one of my coworkers, to the point that i started actively avoiding them. obviously that wasn’t a good state to be in, since it was extremely distracting and was also preventing me from engaging normally with the rest of my coworkers. a few days in i went home and told myself this nonsense needs to stop, <coworker> is going to be part of my life for a long time and i need to find a way to accept them and… after thinking for a bit i didn’t arrive at any new conclusions or perspectives or anything that resembled progress, but the very next day i noticed all the discomfort around said person had disappeared, and it has not returned since then
all that happened a few weeks ago. it’s still incredibly bizarre to me that i had a mental block which was impairing my ability to function in a pretty severe way, and that block simply disappeared when i needed it to. i wonder what other blocks i have, blocks that are constricting my life in ways i don’t even notice, blocks that i could dispel without much effort and become so much freer without. i wonder how much better my relationships would be, if only i could understand these things
“Our concepts are perhaps better thought of as ways of seeing, amongst other possible ways of seeing, rather than as real, atomic elements of the world in and of themselves. When we fail to see that they’ve outlived their expiration date, we inflexibly cling to them in contexts in which they no longer apply, as if they are what matter. We forget that our concepts, our ways of seeing, are tools to be used and discarded as appropriate. We aren’t seeing clearly, but we don’t know how that is. This is the root of suffering.”
been feeling many blocks lately myself and it's comforting to see how we do have agency in removing them and reframing how we see things even if it takes a lot of hard work and growing pains!!
pretty much everyone i know who had a bad relationship with their parents struggles with giving and receiving affection in some significant way » so how do i struggle. HOW VINCENT