"Bring me your weight, your shame, and the devil on your shoulder."

I do best with identifiable need. I'm certainly open to the idea that the needs that I'm identifying are only projections and not truth, but with many-not-all I can see what they need and how I'm filling that need, and I try to position myself so that I can fill that need well enough that I feel useful, because it's easier (ha!) than trying to work on my self esteem and assume people want to be my friend because I'm awesome, or don't want to be my friend because they have bad taste.

For a very, very long time, I used to think people liked to be friends with me because they wanted a reference point of crazy, of badness, so they could look at their lives and say "Well, at least I'm not as bad as Omnia" and I was oh so happy to deliver that.

And there are value-free ways to look at it, I think. Sometimes, people don't mesh and it's not either side of the equation's fault. (though it sounds like a lame way to break up with someone, I really do think it is sometimes neither you nor me). And sometimes I identify a need and am not interested in filling it for some reason. And I used to assume that I was able to read people with a fair degree of accuracy, but I'm learning that I'm seeing a lot of my own shadow in there as well.

I've had the same crush for a while now, which hasn't really happened since college, and even then, the periods of time might just have felt long without actually being long. Mostly, I either get to act on my crushes, or burn them out with a brushfire of practicality, sour grapes and sadness. And I totally thought that I'd done the latter with Bespoke for a little while a handful of months back, but I hadn't really. And it's not a bad thing, I don't mind it, I'm not waiting for it to resolve, I'm not waiting for it to do anything. And he seems to the outward eye to be as self-contained as a cat, nothing in particular bleeds off of him that I can read, and I think that's keeping the crush at a fun (95% of the time) low simmer.

And, of course, as soon as I type 'self-contained as a cat', Frye leaps onto the couch and flops into the middle of my keyboard, demanding scritches. Oh, torties. Awesome, awesome torties.

"Bring me your weight, your shame, and the devil on your shoulder."

I do best with identifiable need. I'm certainly open to the idea that the needs that I'm identifying are only projections and not truth, but with many-not-all I can see what they need and how I'm filling that need, and I try to position myself so that I can fill that need well enough that I feel useful, because it's easier (ha!) than trying to work on my self esteem and assume people want to be my friend because I'm awesome, or don't want to be my friend because they have bad taste.

For a very, very long time, I used to think people liked to be friends with me because they wanted a reference point of crazy, of badness, so they could look at their lives and say "Well, at least I'm not as bad as Omnia" and I was oh so happy to deliver that.

And there are value-free ways to look at it, I think. Sometimes, people don't mesh and it's not either side of the equation's fault. (though it sounds like a lame way to break up with someone, I really do think it is sometimes neither you nor me). And sometimes I identify a need and am not interested in filling it for some reason. And I used to assume that I was able to read people with a fair degree of accuracy, but I'm learning that I'm seeing a lot of my own shadow in there as well.

I've had the same crush for a while now, which hasn't really happened since college, and even then, the periods of time might just have felt long without actually being long. Mostly, I either get to act on my crushes, or burn them out with a brushfire of practicality, sour grapes and sadness. And I totally thought that I'd done the latter with Bespoke for a little while a handful of months back, but I hadn't really. And it's not a bad thing, I don't mind it, I'm not waiting for it to resolve, I'm not waiting for it to do anything. And he seems to the outward eye to be as self-contained as a cat, nothing in particular bleeds off of him that I can read, and I think that's keeping the crush at a fun (95% of the time) low simmer.

And, of course, as soon as I type 'self-contained as a cat', Frye leaps onto the couch and flops into the middle of my keyboard, demanding scritches. Oh, torties. Awesome, awesome torties.