Just Checking In

I like the people in my life, but I hate people in general.  I try to expect the best from them until I have reason to expect the worst, but the trouble is, in my life to date purely from an objective point of view, the amount of people who turned out to be horrible is far higher than that who turned out to be good.  This is not only based on my own experience but others' observations of my experience in kind, it is in part what led me to the mindset I now have.  I wasn't always this way.  At first I was a very outgoing, extroverted child.  I spoke to everyone without apprehension, maybe even to a fault; I got along with everyone, there was no great conflict at first, and it was hard to shut me up.  However over the years more and more people mistreated me, abused me, bullied me, ridiculed me, to a point where the more people I met who turned out to be horrible, the more my confidence was knocked and the more my faith in humanity was eroded until I reached a point where I not only thought that humanity is horrid as a whole, but I actively expected everyone I met to turn out to be just as horrid.  The few people who never made me feel that way were bastions of light in the darkness but they alone could not illuminate the vast emptiness that surrounded me.

This expectation was, and still is one of the reasons I keep myself to myself.  I have a circle of friends I talk to often and some I talk to every day whilst a few others I speak to with rarity.  I have people that have similar interests to me who I can turn to when I want to discuss something on my mind, and I have people whose interests hardly overlap with mine at all who I can turn to when I need a different perspective or just when I want to learn more about life through the experiences of others.  My friends' political opinions vary greatly, from those who are so liberal they are practically anarchists, to those who are so authoritarian that they would give Thatcher a run for her money; I know those who are so tight they wouldn't spend Christmas, to those who are bougie as fuck, right through to those who have more money than sense who think nothing of the price of anything.  The one thing that is common to all of my friendships however is the fact that they are all open minded and respectful of differing opinions, even when those differences are in the extreme.  For me personally, the best example of polar opposite views would be that of my own and that of one of my dearest friends who supported Trump in the US election, something which we have discussed at length many times.  I understand his rationale and reasoning behind his position but I think he was mistaken in that position, nevertheless we can still have a conversation without it ending in hostility.  I think one of the reasons some people find differences intolerable is that those differences would often emerge in the beliefs of people who they agreed with on so many things in life in other areas but had opposing views when it came specific issues, in this case politics.  There was and still is a tendency to believe that if you agree with everything someone says on so many things then they therefore must hold the same political outlook as you - this isn't the case however.  That belief is born of the conclusion that your own political belief is the "right" or "natural" outcome of the experience, knowledge, and opinions on others issues you hold being combined together.  This in turn leads people to the conclusion that any other choice is wrong, or an unnatural conclusion that must be the result of a mistake made somewhere along the way.  Ultimately the reason this belief emerges is because people don't want to consider the possibility that someone else who thinks and feels the same way they do, who had the same experience and possess the same knowledge came to a different conclusion because it threatens their interpretation of the world and implies that they themselves are wrong - this is erroneous of course, as it assumes all human decisions are made based in logic and reason and that isn't the case.

There is a website called iSideWith which you can use to check your position on various political issues against those of political parties from various countries.  On a country by country basis, you fill out a reasonably short survey and submit it.  The site then shows you which political party you should side with, if you were to vote based on policy alone.  One of the most fascinating parts of the website is the analysis of the results, and the demonstration that despite how people should vote based on policy, they often vote for parties that don't actually represent their views at all - sometimes to the extreme of voting for parties that support policies representing the exact opposite.  Which party you vote for is as much an emotional choice as it is a logical one.  Reason alone is not an indicator of which way you will vote.

This is one of the reasons I find people in general to be exhausting, the fact that their thoughts, feelings, and their actions do not align often makes them unpredictable.  There aren't many people I know of beyond my circle of friends who actually act upon the thoughts and feelings they profess to have, as opposed to acting in conflict with them.  The fact people do this takes a lot of energy out of me personally when most conversations come back to that fact.  "I'm not racist but..." et al are pet hates, these prefixes are an acknowledgement that they are fully aware of what they are doing and choose to do it anyway.  People demonstrating why they shouldn't do something, then doing it, and then asking why they did it or complaining about it and regretting the decision they made is insufferable at times.  I can at least understand these moments of weakness when they are related to things that revolve around willpower, knowing you shouldn't eat certain foods for example and caving in and eating it anyway then regretting it, that's understandable because there is something to be gained from the experience that reinforces the behaviour which can be hard to resist, but when it comes to behaviours that have no clear reward, that repetition is frustrating.  What is to be gained from behaviour that is fundamentally destructive, either of the self or of others, with no benefit or reward at all?  I find this exhausting to deal with and I am glad that my circle of friends don't act in this way, signs that people do are a red flag to me and usually encourage me to stay away from them.

People in general take a lot of energy and don't give you much in return.  I'm not in a position where I have a lot of energy to waste at the moment due to my health, although my physical symptoms have all but passed, the mental strain and dark cloud of depression is proving difficult to emerge from; but even when I have the energy to expend, I would still be reluctant to devote so much of it to other people.  I am of the belief that you need to be aware of how much energy you waste on various things in life, that you should identify those things that drain your energy, and eliminate them from your life if you can - and yes that includes people, although in their case I don't mean you should eliminate the actual person, but rather the interaction you have with them, or reduce it if you're not in a position where you can eliminate it completely.

I need time to recharge when I have been around people for too long, or when I have had to engage in social situations more than I am comfortable doing.  The best way to do that for me personally is to cut myself off completely.  Those in my circle of friends know and understand why I do this and why it is necessary; I can relate to others who do this and I can be completely understanding of that need.  For my friends and I, we choose to operate a "check in" system where we send a simple message to each other every now and then asking if everything is ok or not, and if we need time.  I am grateful that I have people in my life that I can say "I don't want to talk right now" without having to explain myself and they don't take any offence - they do this too and I know how much it means to them by the fact we are so close and always have been.  For any of my friends I know we could go months without speaking and resume as if no time at all had passed - thankfully we have never gone through any periods that any of us actually needed to do that.  We usually check in after a few days.  It takes time to get to that place with people though, it takes time to understand another person's mentality and to recognise their coping mechanisms, and the signs that they are under pressure.

As I have said however, I wasn't always like this.  I was incredibly needy when I was younger, to the point where I needed to talk to people every single day and if I couldn't then I panicked and worried, and if anyone ever wanted to go for any extended period of time without talking I was afraid it meant they didn't want to talk to me at all and that we'd stop speaking entirely and I would never see them again.  I've come to understand with age that this was borne out of a fear of abandonment, and a belief that nobody had a true friendship with me, that most people were just entertaining me because they had to, not because they actually wanted to. This mentality first emerged as I entered my teenage years after experiencing one of the most traumatic experiences of my life that caused my personality to shift from one of extroversion to one of introversion, from one of implicitly trusting everyone at first, to one of explicitly distrusting everyone.  There's a very deep rabbit hole would could fall down in discussing this, I do not mean to trivialise the topic here but for the sake of brevity it's enough to know this was something it has taken me decades to overcome - and I'm still not quite "there" yet.

The only way I was able to take steps to overcome that fear and break that inner saboteur's hold on me was to step back and let it happen to see if it was true, like someone stepping out onto the ice for the first time, the only way to get over the fear of falling is to let it happen, then get up and do it again - it's important to note here this only works with some fears, for many others this is an incredibly bad idea so don't take this as a one-size-fits-all solution.  When it came to the fear of abandonment I would stop speaking to other people so much and I would gauge whether I felt they were drifting away.  The more I did it, slowly over time, the more confident I became in realising this was something I was telling myself and convincing myself of, and paying attention only to the things that reinforced that belief, people made the same effort they always had to keep me in their lives and that made me recognise the fear was irrational and unfounded.  Eventually the confidence built up enough through the exposure to the point where that mentality was all but abandoned; the evidence that it wasn't true outweighed the counter, this negated the paranoia that people secretly hated me, and made me recognise I didn't need to talk to them every single day for them to like me, which led me to where I am today, with friendships that have virtually no concept of time attached to them.

If you find yourself sharing these thoughts, it's important to take a step back and think about why you think this way, and for all the evidence you have built up in your mind to support your case, you need to put that to one side for a moment and say to yourself, "okay, I have enough evidence to convince me of that, now what can I find to convince me of the opposite" and start to seek out evidence to the contrary, ignore everything that would reinforce what you already convinced yourself of, and start to focus on anything and everything that contradicts it.  Slowly build up the evidence to the contrary and continue until you have enough to be able to judge for yourself whether you were right in the first place or if you had just convinced yourself of a lie you had repeated ad nauseam. 

This can apply to any belief really, and underlines something I have tried to live by, that you should not hold onto a belief for the sake of holding onto it - I refer to this simply as "The Taste Of Olives" named so for the fact as a young child I tried olives and hated them; for years I refused to eat them, I avoided them like the plague, until one day I had food containing them without realising and enjoyed the taste, which led me to the realisation that I actually liked the taste of olives as an adult - I had held onto a belief for so long and never challenged it, denying myself experience in the process.  I try to avoid this mentality now by questioning everything when there is a time and a place to question it; I have tried to abandon the notion of predicating beliefs on conclusions I made long ago and try to remain open to the reality that I am not the same person I was however many years ago, and in that time something might have changed.