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| 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…
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