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.
