Living alone dairies #8; coming back to Jos, multiple epiphanies, friendship trauma and exploding extensions.
The last entry I posted has over 1.5k claps now.
Hold on for me while I scream.
Thank you.
Its Saturday now, and as usual I’m behind on writing, but I’ll make up for it anyways. This week has been good to me actually; I got back to Jos on Tuesday and oddly, it feels like I never left. I did miss the solitude of aloneness and my own space, so its nice to be back. Attended CDS (community development service; a weekly meeting that NYSC core members have to attend. The name is pretty self-explanatory, so) on Thursday, bought puff-puff — its been a very long time since I had it- came back home and just good vibes generally.
Another thing that helped is the foodstuff I brought from home (thank you, Mother), so I haven’t had to buy much, which is great because I can save the money I was going to use to get stuff.
Speaking of savings, I just recently made the horrendous (just kidding, just kidding) discovery that you actually cannot break Piggyvest safelocks. I opened a target safelock account in April and resolved to save a specific amount out of my monthly service allowance into it, I locked it till next year April; so, exactly one year. I basically made it a deposit only account. When I created the account, I thought even though I locked it, I could easily unlock it (some other types of piggyvest locks will allow you to unlock them, but will charge a 1–1.5% breaking fee over the money within) alas, there is no way to unlock this specific safelock, till the maturity date comes round.
Don’t ask me why I wanted to unlock it earlier than the maturity date, because that is not your business and you need to focus on yourself, dear.
Anyways, the funny thing is how I’ve almost reached the target amount and I still have eight months left.
Amazing stuff. I’ll just extend the saving goal.
I had an epiphany recently and I’m going to share it with you guys; we are so afraid of being judged — hyper focused on external opinion — because of how we are also judgmental of others.
In uni I had a friend who was extremely concerned about how people perceived him and his actions/personality. He was so afraid of “negative” opinions that he would become a block of dry cement during public interactions, hiding huge parts of his usually vibrant personality.
As I got to know this person, I started to piece together why this person was the way he was. I noticed he would always be the first to comment on how someone looked or spoke or presented themselves, and it was almost always in a derogatory way; he was quick to make a joke out of people and their attributes.
You see the connection?
Because of how picky and judgmental he was of others, he automatically used the same lens to view himself, trying as much as possible to not be someone he himself would judge/make fun of. This in turn made him hypersensitive to public opinion and without him even knowing, stiff and uncomfortable in public settings.
This is obviously an exaggerated instance (he was anxious and paranoid most of the time), but I think it provides a lot of insight as to why we are so afraid of being judged.
We are often just reflecting our own judgements of others back to ourselves, constantly shifting and modifying ourselves so we won’t be like the people we find weird or cringe or silly.
I think its very interesting, how we as humans interact with each other and how who we are is shaped so much by the people around us, and not just who they are, but how we perceive them and the opinions we have about them.
If you couldn’t already tell, I love psychology and understanding how and why we are who we are.
I think it’s about to rain, its 1:13pm and I haven’t had anything to eat the whole of today. So I’m going to get food before I actually turn to dust.
Its 11:29 pm right now on Sunday.
I just watched “The devil wears Prada” for the first time, I know its something of a cult classic, and I know a lot of you are probably thinking, wow, in 2022?
Well, yes, in 2022.
Regardless of time passed, its still a great movie, a powerful one at that. It really makes you think; what would you do, if presented with the most illustrious, glamorous career in the world, but the only caveat was that you would stray so far from who you really are, you would be unrecognizable.
I think both Andy and Miranda are very similar, but also very divergent in how they employ those similarities; they are both very strong willed, resilient characters with both the intellect and the confidence to do whatever they wanted actually, but they have different values, so they went different directions.
Gorgeous movie.
This week I learnt about overextending myself for people/in situations that ultimately yield no results/positive feedback.
I’ve always been the kind of person that cares very deeply about people around me and that goes out of their way to be as best a person as I can be to almost everyone I come in contact with (except bigots), I’ve always been the soft friend, the kind friend, the generous friend, the thoughtful friend.
Most times I love that about myself. I love that I can be empathetic and people can come to me with their issues and that everyone generally has good opinions of me. But when does it get too much?
I’ve consistently been in a lot of situations where I’m constantly pouring into others, always being the “go-to friend” to the point where it felt like I lost my own personality apart from being a “good” person or friend. When I was younger, I had a friend who exploited this specific part of me to the maximum, and that was my first run in with a narcissist. It took me almost three years for me to realize how toxic, abusive and manipulative this friendship had become — and this was after three years of friendship prior — this realization showed me just how much of myself I repeatedly sacrificed to please the people I loved, and most importantly, to be loved by them in return.
This realization was both liberating and horrifying; liberating that I could finally see beyond the shackles I had been previously bound by, could finally see that I was in a piss-poor excuse for a friendship and I could most absolutely do better, and horrifying that this ultra-docile, too soft, love seeking thing was part of me, I was in these situations because of — ultimately — myself.
It was a horrifying discovery that this need to be loved/liked by the people around me and my overwhelming empathy made for the most potent of mixtures; a narcissists dream.
What more could a self-obsessed person want? Other than someone who would do everything they could in their power to get their love? Someone who felt and empathized with everything that they professed?
I was basically attracting them to me.
Very scary stuff, but I’m grateful for the level of self-awareness I possess. My therapist once remarked on my “above average levels of self-awareness”. There’s not much about myself you could tell me that I don’t already know.
Anyways, this was when I started to put up my guard a lot more and really analyze my actions within pre-existing relationships. Its safe to say that in the past two, maybe three years, I’ve let go of a lot of dead weight. During this epiphany, I realized that we as humans are innately selfish and mostly self-serving; I wanted people to like me and refer to me as good or kind because it feels good to have people say good things about you. It feels good to be the friend people can count on, to be the person who always holds the door open for the person behind them. This is not to negate the fact that I’ve always and will always be a deeply empathetic person, there genuinely isn’t much that I don’t feel. I feel everything, my emotions and those of the people around me. Why would I stand by and see you feeling bad/going through a hard time and not at the very least offer comfort? I am physically unable to watch people in pain/distress and feel nothing.
Of course, this is both good and bad, but I digress.
Likeability is a potent drug, but it yields close to nothing because it is born of mostly selfish motives.
The desire to be liked.
This selfishness isn’t necessarily “bad”, as those acts that are performed for the sake of likeability, at the end of the day are “good” acts; you gave a friend money when they were in need, you helped a classmate out with their homework, you made a handsome donation to charity. These are all good things, they are putting positivity into the world, you are helping people, but most of the time we do them out of that desire to be liked, or to be viewed a certain away by certain people.
The trick is finding that balance.
When does it become an overextension? When does it cross the boundary of “being a good person” and into the territory of people that are ready to take advantage of you?
Questions, quandaries.
And of course, being someone that battles with this very human desire to be liked and then also being deeply emotive and empathetic, I have come to be hyper skeptical of people that want to take from me without giving back.
I guess that seems cold, but that’s how my brain works now. I’ve been used and abused and made to feel like an idiot time and time again, that taking time to hyper analyze anyone who is getting close to me or even people I’m already close to is habitual now. I’m always noticing “little” markers that tell you a persons real intent or who they actually are.
The moral of this story is; be kind, be generous, be compassionate and be empathetic, but be selective to whom you show these attributes to. Not everyone has to like you or think you’re a good person. You will be the villain in a lot of stories somewhere, and that’s fine. Not everyone around you deserves that extra bit of kindness, keep it, reserve it for the people who have proven to you that they would give you that same kindness in multiples.
In other news, my extension plug just went up in a puff of smoke.
Serves me right for getting a cheap no name brand in my haste.
Its 1:00 am now and I think this is where I sign off. I’ve been oddly personal in this particular journal post and in not sure how I feel about that, I mean, even most of my in real life friends don’t know much about what goes on in my head and here I am writing it all out.
But at the end of the day, this is actually all for me. I write this all for me, so I don’t particularly care who sees it.
I don’t need a why.
Goodnight.
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