Insecurity is so painfully, imperfectly human.
I’ve been reading a novel lately, the details of which are actually rather inconsequential. What’s struck me over and over is the dialogue.
The main character is a typically flawed, introspective and remarkably intelligent young woman. She’s in love with someone, but she’s sharply insecure about that relationship. Not surprising.
The brilliance is in the fact that her love interest allows – nay, encourages – her to speak what she’s thinking and feeling, regardless of how it may sound in the braces of love. Irrational. Needy. Insecure. Desperate. Wanting. And then he does something remarkable: he responds to it, and is reassuring. We as readers are immediately drawn to their relationship because as imperfect as it is, it has the element of reassurance.
We crave reassurance as humans. In fact, many of us are quite capable of recognizing that our thoughts and feelings are often irrational and driven by wayward emotion. But we want those we care about to not only encourage us to share those torturous thoughts, but we want to hear that they have them too. We want them to tell us it will be ok. That they care about us. That they’re going to be there anyway. The dialogue I’m reading is moving, if only because it satiates the wish we (or at least I) have to have someone look you up and down, and still tell you that you hold a very special place in their world.
Some of the most primal of human connections are based in a very fundamental sense of acceptance. We use familiar life constructs to define that: they like the same music I do, or we laugh at the same jokes, or we enjoy the same movies or books or activities. But what’s really at issue is the unconscious message that “you understand me”, and often in terms not easily articulated in written or spoken words. It’s a sense that by our affinities, we’re communicating something far more complicated and intricate about who we are, but those are more safely tucked behind more mundane ideas of hobbies.
Unless, of course, someone clicks with us enough to translate what lies beneath. And then, somehow, we feel validated. We are comforted in the knowledge that we are unique, that we have something to offer to someone that’s special to them, that they’d be missing something if not for us. We are reassured that we are not accidental.
How very fragile and elusive that can be.
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We all have issues, we are all tired and we are all busy. We are all differently the same. We all know this on some level, and knowing this we naturally gravitate towards others with similar issues. Like attracts like. I could talk about the merits of helping others out and reciprocating, as there are MANY but…
The ONE thing that I can’t stress enough on everyone is this:
If you want to be something, act that way until you are that way. Envision and create your whole world around you. Ensconce yourself with only thoughts & beliefs of how you want to be.
Seeing is believing but more importantly BELIEVING IS SEEING. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you see it you will believe it and if you believe it you will see it. Believe what you want and you will bring it in to your reality.
We are the creators of our own reality and are responsible to ourselves first and foremost. No one can create reality for you. As I was writing this a commercial for Hugo Boss comes on saying, “why live real when you can create reality. why live small when you can take the big dive. the rest is up to you’. If THIS ISNT the point i dont know what is. And as to hit the point home AGAIN, it repeats after another commercial played.
Share, create, and co-create with others. We’re all at different levels. Help where you can, give reassurance where you can and others will do for you where they can. Be selfish by being selfless.
Looking back at my relationships with my closest friends, it strikes me that the one common thread among them all was, in fact, the soul connection. Absolutely none of the other stuff mattered – even if I, in my own desperation to “show” them our connection (as if I was the only one who felt it), found ways to mention my own tastes in hopes that they’d share theirs. It didn’t matter. There are so many things I don’t know about my best friends, both men and women, but I don’t care. We’ve pledged friendship for as long as it lasts, forever if that happens to be the case, because of that “click.”
And, you know, even when I do care? When I’m convinced I’ve let them down and they’ll think I’m not what we both believed? Reconnecting with them, even in the form of apology, tends to set us back on the right path, whether real or imagined. And so for even the deepest, most connected of friends, who truly seem to share a psychic bond, real communication–as opposed to assumptions or memories (the truly fragile and elusive scraps of a relationship, trapped in the prism of our own minds)–remains the most effective means to the end.