Sweet Disposition: Maybe we were just meant to be friends…

Sketch one by Zoe Sees

Ever walked into a room or just looked at another person and it suddenly felt like you know them or that you have met them before? Or even an “I must get to know this person!”, or, “Hectic! This person and I get along so well!”, “…where have they been all my life?” It’s like you are instantaneously best friends or you should have been best friends forever already… and what makes such a connection even more complex and fascinating to comprehend is if the other person is of the opposite sex with added attractiveness…then there’s fire, because now all of a sudden it’s as if you have met the one, your ‘soul mate’, your best friend…right? The person I could spend the rest of my life with, the one that understands me, understands my ins and outs, thinks the way I do, loves what I love, likes what I like, laughs for what I laugh for…the person that has everything that I am looking for in someone, the person that will make me happy forever…my future… and then in a matter of weeks, and in some cases days, we are “in love”… and then all of a sudden, I love him/her. My previous blog entry ‘Epilogue’ is in itself a poetic expression of such…

We constantly form lots of different types of ties with lots of different types of people, all the time, every day in every single way that we interact with them. And the one thing I can say boldly is that not all relationships (even friendships) are formed with a healthy means, which could be detrimental to the development of the rest of the relationship if it is to continue growing. In a lot of cases it is quite easy for us to recognize if a particular type of person is not intended for our closer circle of friends (just being honest), but what about the ones that we don’t recognize so easily, the ones that are inspiring, encouraging, beautiful, the ones that come in the forms of really awesome people? Not necessarily a bad person but maybe just not the person I should be getting too close to for the growth of myself and them… How then do we recognize that the nature of it, such a relationship, is or could be toxic (harmful) to both parties and what is  even more difficult is, how do we break them once it has gotten to that point?

In my life I have made this mistake countless times, and I really mean countless times, friendships that could have been beautiful were destroyed because of blurred lines. And every time only upon retrospect have I found myself thinking, I was wrong but I could never figure out how and why, but I just knew… and it wasn’t until recently that I discovered what it was that I was experiencing… a rather embarrassing story I may add: so some time ago I met this girl and instantly I could feel ‘a connection’, I was single, but at the time I was in a weird state of thinking I should be moving on, and that together with a lot of other influences and things going on, made meeting her, to me, feel like it’s all happening at the right time (can I please laugh at me at this point). I felt so overwhelmed by her and her essence just spoke volumes  and even though I did not know much about her I could just sense a gentle, beautiful being full of compassion and warmth, someone I could build a future with, my mind went haywire…I was ‘in love’ at first sight (haha another #lol moment). Long story short I sent her a rather embarrassing message to which she never replied, and rightfully so might I add, though leaving me feeling like a loser, but I was a bit intense though (ok maybe not a bit – I mean based on the description I just gave, you can probably pick up how I must have come across)… after some self-reflection I came to realize that maybe I should be looking for some meaningful non-romantic relationships with people, in particular how I interact with woman, the being their friends, no intentions. The following couple of weeks I unconsciously started consciously engaging in more friendly relationship building conversations and friendships with many different people, colleagues and church friends (the reason I mention this is because the age that I’m at, I felt like I didn’t really have time and space to add new people to my life, except for a companion, but I tried and added effort and ended up here, quite happy I started flipping that script) and through this I somehow started being a support system to many, offering time and advice and just plain friendship, offering to walk a journey with some where I could and being genuinely interested in their well-being, and in the end guys and girls both… and the fact that I am choosing to remain single is in some part inspired by this but has also allowed me to see this side of life…

This helped me to realize something about myself, I started recognising a pattern as to how I have gone about getting close to the people from my previous relationships (be it romantic or failed romantic – you know what I mean) and started reassessing the how’s and why’s, in a sense, what was it about them, why did I like them, what drew me to them, was it realistic for me to expect anything of them, and were those partners really future material, not in a bad way, just in a sense for me, because they were and still are phenomenal people… and I do believe that they will be someone’s great future but for all intents and purpose, it just turned out not mine, and then I had the light bulb moment… all this time I was just supposed to be there for them, just be their friend, just be a support system, just a shoulder, just a genuine person offering up genuine time to listen, no other intentions, and by them I mean most of the ones in my past (maybe all of them)… but somehow (I think I know how) our ‘souls’ (for lack of a better word) connected and because no real boundaries were set, the lines became blurred and what should have been and could have been great friendships became romantic rendezvous, and we instead settled for  our own personal desires and gains just to satisfy the now… and that is sad my man, I look back at some of the people, the friends, and I can’t help but think, how would it have been if that wasn’t the case, where would our friendship be now… I mean, it is so tough losing a friend, and even more difficult to break an emotional tie (perhaps not as tough as losing someone to death) but in many cases we do feel as if that it is the end if we break up and we do in fact go into some sort of depression because we have allowed this person into the depths of our hearts, and now they have left with a piece of it…and that is such dangerous grounds to be on if that person is of the opposite sex. 

Don’t get me wrong, did I love the people I was involved with, yes! Did I really like them, yes! Was it a pleasant experience for me spending time with them and dating them, yes! Did I learn a lot from who they were and was I there to encourage them and comfort them, yes! Do I still have a sense of love for them, yes! I think I always will and I also always will miss the friendship that we shared, but would I go back to them to try and save what was or do I think it could have worked out differently if it wasn’t for this and that, then I’d say no, I think we were just meant to be friends… I think us hooking up or getting together was fueled by our own desires and feelings of lostness (is that even a word) and loneliness or rejection by others or just the anxiety of life’s troubles overwhelming us. Times like those make us feel very persuaded to want certain types of connections that are best given by another person through simple human comfort and love, and it’s even better if it’s given by the guy/girl that has been giving us time… and then for things to get stirred up, all it would take is few lovely words here and there, a touch, a smile, or even a text, and then things become real… the fire is started and that can be intense my man. The moment things like this don’t work out people are left hurt and possibly even more broken than what they started out as.

I had recently watched the motion picture called “500 Days of Summer” and what was really interesting about it to me was that both the guy and the girl had two different opinions about love and life and how things and people end up ending-up. He believed in love and destiny that all souls have a partner to meet up with and she did not. He ended up falling completely in love with her and consequently thought that she might be that for him, while she made it clear that she is just enjoying the pleasures of them spending time together, all of it genuine and real. He saw more and she kind of knew that he wasn’t it, the one, but still it did not mean that she did not enjoy getting to know him. Was she genuine, yes, I’d like to think so… is he maybe a hopeless romantic, definitely, not a bad quality to have at all. Was it meant to be for them? Not at all, and this is evident in the fact that she got married to another guy she fell in love almost instantaneously. The irony of it all is that early in the flick he tells her that one will just know when it comes to love, she disagrees at the time but in the end would reveal that that is exactly how it happened for her… There are three things about this flick that I deem of significance for the sake of this post, firstly, even though they broke up, she still enjoys doing the things they did together, e.g. visiting the bench in the park, signifying to me that she was being honest with him and did enjoy spending time with him. Secondly, whenever he was thinking things are looking up between the two of them, the song “Sweet Disposition” by “The Temper Trap” is being played and it’s almost as if the song, in those moments, represents him being swept away in pure bliss by what he thinks is happening. To me that was symbolic of the fact that many times we see and fill in our own little details about things happening around us to make them fit our own realities, making connotations to things for the benefit of our fairytales.  And lastly, in the end he meets a new girl and her name is Autumn, the season after Summer, signifying that he enjoyed summer but now it’s time for a new time in his life with new hope. The new season.  

People come and go through our lives all the time, some are meant to stay and others are just meant to pass through, we have the power and we can decide who stays or we can allow room for error by forming toxic relationships. But I want to add that I do feel that if we do not set boundaries for ourselves in the instances where meet these people where we can potentially get it wrong, it can make things really complicated, especially if we find ourselves or others going through a tough time and needing some connection of sorts. It can so easily start with things just looking a bit bleak and all of sudden all we want is to be needed and comforted…and these are the times that we must be really vigilant about who we do this with… We need to protect our hearts as well as the hearts of the people around us and that comes with the responsibility of the matters of the heart, and how we conduct ourselves with it, that is where the authority lies… We can be victorious in this matter and people’s hearts can be healed and mended just by us all establishing real nontoxic relationships, by guarding our hearts and still allowing personalities to flourish and inspire… I believe that our hearts belong to the ones we see ourselves growing old with, the ones we marry, the ones we would move a mountain for, and them we should guard our hearts and they should be the only ones holding the keys to the darkest rooms of it, and not just any Harry, Barry or Kerry… 

Epilogue

Us, we collide, we stand, it’s just us and we hide

You and I the fire, fire on our stripes

Misunderstood, misread, patently missed

Our streams run empty, our hearts not filled

We, our combination of souls

Our collaboration of words; in-depth our thoughts

Still in, still awed by retort, still in

Never alone this walk I walk, however this walk it’s been

You, gazing into the away

Taking time with, beautiful and rare

I stepped, I stopped, I stared; and you glared

Radiantly bold and magnificently fair

me.

Home feed: Am I Posting or Boasting?

Am I what you read on my Facebook profile?  Am I the photos or posts you see on my Instagram feed or Pinterest or Tumblr account, or am I the stuff I say on the various chat mediums I use? Am I that person? Perhaps, maybe to some extent I am… but who am I really? Am I not a real life person with real life emotions and real life things to say and do? I mean, even with this blog, do I live out all these things that I find myself writing about? Or am I just another person trying to shove my opinions down people’s throats? Perhaps to some extent I am…. But I must say that I do feel a strong inclination to say that I have found that it’s much easier for people, including me, to hide behind the persona we create for ourselves on social network mediums. I have also come to realize that we tend to build up a character (an avatar) that seems so remarkable and accomplished that we find it more comforting to live that, the avatar, rather than the real deal, the real life, the real you.

I do acknowledge that in a sense it is easier for us to chat to or chat up someone via a chat app or social network medium because of various reasons, maybe not being confident enough or maybe just keeping contact with friends that have moved to far away cities or even countries. I can appreciate that, like for the purpose of communication, but then there is the case of just not being comfortable with oneself and we end up choosing to communicate solely by means of social media rather than the ‘old-school’ face to face, just simply to avoid who we really are…perhaps a bit boring and maybe not as glamorous and as exciting…all just a fear may I add. My blog entry, ‘Ziron’, is in some part an effort, in poetic form, to try and portray how pegged we have become to technology and the social needs it offers to boost our egos as well as how it has shaped who we are, who we have become and in a way how it is shaping where we are going… narcissistic, egotistical and self-centered…almost like an ‘I’ generation. 

Personally, I must admit that I have fallen victim to the madness of social network mania, and so have many of us, it’s not that we are weak in any sense, or not that we are not able to think for ourselves, it is just that we, as humans, like to have some kind of significance and our preferred counterfeit internet persona allows us that. I suppose yearning for belonging and identity is who we are fundamentally, it’s kind of what makes us human beings, in a sense we are much more content with vicariously living our lives through the lenses and screens and tales and adventures of others. We want to know what other people are getting up to so we can also do it, or do it better, we want to compare our lives to theirs, we want to compete with theirs and we want to show off what we have done and are going to do. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there is anything wrong or bad about uploading things you have done, your adventure, your awesome boyfriend making you breakfast in bed…again…like he did yesterday…no, not at all…I think it so cool that we have platforms that serve as online diaries, its brilliant, it gives people that don’t diarize, that comfort.  It’s just the things we post though… that is what we need to filter, the content of what we post, I feel that we really need to evaluate why we post things, is it to enrich or to boast?  Are we sharing something of value or just posting to post? Do we have something to say or do we just want to say something? Are we inspiring, encouraging and stimulating people or just undermining people’s intelligence and hanging out our laundry? And lastly, is it a gossiping platform or a medium of social expansion?

 I have done this. I have done of these things many a time, I used to want to ‘chat’ to people and have no intention at all of pursuing them but made it sound as such in the conversation because I knew I would never see them in real life… Until one day I did… I have posted status updates to boast, or to show off a pretentious, careless, imprudent existence that I was trying to relish; meanwhile Facebook and other social networks were just tools I used to get the necessary approval of it… I have posted arrogant photos on networks to maintain a lifestyle that can only be maintained using social network mediums… and none of it unintentional. Other than that I have also done this for other people’s profiles. I have intentionally liked people’s photos or posts that I could not for the life me figure out why it was posted but I just liked it to ‘make them not feel bad’, not because I’m better or have better post but just because I felt like it could do with a ‘like’… wrong hey, I know, you probably thinking if I had done that to you… probably, and not to come across as boasting  or anything, but I do assume many people do stuff like that all the time, just because I’m doing it, I’m not special in any way, so there is no reason for this to my innovation…we are human beings and we function from the same fundamental determinations and so in some areas we do function the same, no matter what our Facebook profiles says.   

I believe that every single person has an arrogant persona in them and somehow we develop a hunger for it and so we end up wanting it to get fed. I know I do, I post stuff, I get likes and comments and sometimes I do it for that sole purpose…. Yeah, I do that?  …and again I feel many other people do just that based on some of the posts I have seen.  Go ahead and run through your social media accounts and just see which of the post are really worth your time and which is just attention seeking? We all have certain social needs, even if you are an introvert, we all need some kind of human contact to affirm us, make us feel part of something, no man is an island, no-one can live in this world alone. It is just so sad to see that we rather opt for the virtual interaction, we settle for the notification, in fact we yearn for the notification, we want it. That is utter rubbish! What we should be yearning for is proper human contact, lunch with a person that has a beautiful personality, coffee with a person that can tell you about what they are feeling and tasting, no typing, no emoticon, no likes and follows, just real words from real mouths, words with a voice, words that have meaning beyond it just being said…words  that echo far beyond just the ear drum it reaches, causing ripples in time and transcending deeper than a text message that is typed ever could.

I guess what I‘m trying to say is that we should stop being on our mobile devices and laptops and computer screens for hours on end and let us go out and meet real people, let’s meet them and form real relationships with them. Let us step out of our comfort zones and let us stop hyping up our internet profiles and let us live out the lives we have been given. Let us live out who we are meant to be, beautiful, vibrant, and alive with personality, with something to give, something to share, a story to tell and lives to inspire. Let us find out who other people are and listen to their words, the way they speak, act, what they like, dislike, how life has shaped them, how they got here and where they come from, who they are… A friend once told me that the greatest gift we can give any person is our time, and the beauty of that it also takes time to get to know someone and it takes time for someone to feel loved… so let us start giving people our time, I know we don’t have a lot of it but we can start somewhere…but I think let us start by spending real time with real people that will equate to real experiences and real emotions shared and hopefully somehow contributing to changing the real world. It’s in us, we are the power, it is in you, and it is in me…

Ziron

...walking in a line, just walking, walking, walking;

with our two toned set of mind, we keep talking, talking, talking;

keep working, keep trying, harder and harder, we want to get there,

dreading the day it catches up with us, we're scared;

we disguise ourselves by changing into different colours every day,

 fear of the fact that we won’t blend in with our 'natural' habitat...it’s the uniformity...

we reveal ourselves to hope, investing it in trust,

distorting the past and imagining a shimmering future that we'll never forget...it’s the conformity...

it’s us,

it’s we,

it’s u,

it’s me.

Ziron.