I Am an Idiot

I have a near-pathological need to feel special and needed.  I’ve been fighting it consciously since I was 14 years-old.  It keeps rearing it’s head in new and more insidious ways.  It makes me competitive in less than good ways.  It has inspired moments of both reasonably acceptable, motivational, inspirational levels of envy and jealousy but mostly it almost always sets me up to fail both myself and others.

And these failures happen in all sorts of wonderful ways.  It makes me over-solicitous at times, obsequious at others.  It turns people off and away.  Some of these people aren’t worth keeping around likely because lord knows the last thing I need at this point in my life is more people who are put off and alienated by even the most simple act of kindness.  However, it is also a way in which I smother otherwise healthy, lovely people with my need to be needed.

The side of it all that I figured out early was that if by some chance I found someone who needed to need as much as I need to be needed the net result was that I was sucked dry and couldn’t fill anyone needs anymore for anything.  This happened a number of times and I burnt out and into a hollow shell and ditched those “friends” right when they might have needed me most because I had nothing left to offer.  Drained.  Done.

I think this tendency of mine is at its worst when I am personally going through a lot of shit.  I’d always rather be thinking about someone else.  I’d always rather be dealing with someone else’s life, problems, challenges.  It can make me meddling and presumptuous.  Not always, but certainly often enough to make me an idiot who is always getting in the way by wielding my very best intentions.  

I am selfish in my selflessness.  Stupid in my inability to demand more from others so that I may need as well as  be needed.  I do not demand reciprocity and worse than that I pre-empt any need on the part of others TO provide reciprocity by providing them with excuses not to.

“I would really like to hear from you [request for reciprocity] but I know you are really busy at work and that your mother is in town so don’t worry about getting back to me until you have time [defensively providing them with an excuse not to write and myself with a reason for not hearing from them when/if they don't write]“

Like I said:  I am an idiot.  But I don’t have the first fucking clue how to STOP being an idiot except to just stop writing to anyone, stop calling anyone, stop participating and wait for people to find me for a while.

Solitude will be hard at this point in my life but I think my dignity and well-being require it.  And it’s not a test of my friends and their friendship – it’s a walk of fire for myself – to test myself.  To test myself to see if I can handle not being “helpful” and “generous” for a while.  Because right now, all it’s doing is stressing me out and it’s also a large part of what got me into this mess of separation and stress and stress-induced nausea in which I currently live.

I need a change.

I need to change.

I just need to figure out how.