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Pedestals and Floors
I had a dream deja vu. Or a deja vu dream, whatever you want to call it. In my dream, I woke up and checked the time on my mobile phone. It read 10:33am. Then I went back to sleep. When I woke up for real, the time on my mobile phone read 10:33am. Weirdness huh?
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Her: He says he loves me.
Me: That’s got to be good, right?
Her: How can he love me when he doesn’t even know me?
Me: I thought all this dating, all this time together, it’s for getting to know each other?
Her: He only knows the me he sees when we’re together. He thinks he knows me but he doesn’t.
Me: You mean you put on a show? You pretend to be someone you’re not? Tsk tsk.
Her: No, I don’t. I’ve been as me and as real as I could possibly be. I think the time we spend with each other isn’t enough, you know? Or maybe it’s how we spend time with each other. It feels so superficial. He hasn’t seen my uberdorky side, or when I have tantrums, or when I’m really stressed. I don’t know if he’ll be able to handle me.
Me: Give it time, give him a chance. Like you said, the situation hasn’t happened yet. You said it feels superficial right now. Maybe because you still keep him at arms length. Share your life with him, your experiences at work, your thoughts, the things that stress you. Open up.
Her: But I’m scared of him seeing me that way.
Me: Scared? Of what?
Her: Of learning that he only loves the image he has of me. He has me on this pedestal. What if the real thing doesn’t live up to the image of he’s created? What happens then?
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Me: Hey, tell me about this new guy.
Her: He’s so cute, and we have a lot of things in common, like the authors we like, and the music we listen to. He’s smart and funny. We have amazing chemistry. And he says he likes me. In that way. You know.
Me: Cool! When do I get to meet him.
Her: Dunno, I’m thinking of not seeing him again.
Me: What? Why not? It sounds like you 2 hit it off.
Her: He doesn’t know me.
Me: …
Her: He thinks I’m this cool, smart girl. But I’m not.
Me: WTF, of course you’re cool and smart! We wouldn’t be friends if you weren’t!
Her: But he’s so much smarter! He’s read stuff I’ve never even heard of. What can I contribute to the relationship? What if I’ve exhausted the contents of these brain cells? I’ll bore him to death, and then he’ll dump me! And I’ll go into this deep depression again like last time.
Me: There has got to be things he doesn’t know that you do. Or things he’s not good at but you excel at. You can educate each other.
Her: See, that’s what I think too. But he has me on this fcuking pedestal! He thinks I’m the smartest girl he’s met in this life! What if he stops loving me when he realizes that I’m not?
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What is it with you guys and pedestals anyway? And what’s up with us girls analyzing every little thing and making simple things complicated?
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“I love you.”
And she lowers her feet on the floor, gets up from the couch, and leaves.
4 Responses to “Pedestals and Floors”
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March 23rd, 2005 at 16:41
*sigh*
Why does it have to get so complicated?
March 23rd, 2005 at 17:38
SPS - Scratch Paper Syndrome. Given that I currently have no blog, I plead you to indulge me this one instance.
I find this post kinda funny, actually, because it strikes a chord; namely this notion I have had since… God, since I was a freshman in high school,
all idealism and pimples.
Anyway. It’s in my little notebook of strange notions and random thoughts. That notion of mine went that who we are as a person lies not inside us, but inside the heads of other people. I’ll try to explain.
Our inner nature, what we are, primarily - caregiver, architect, judge, paragon, etc., is the us inside our heads. This inner us provides the spark we use to fuel our existence.
Consider as a block of marble, each one with its own color, type, density, veins, and imperfections. Of course, as life goes on its merry way, throwing
challenges, achievements, events, and people at us, this marble block gets shaped slowly into something more. Now, we -the block itself- don’t necessarily know that we are, or that we have been, shaped. Still the same marble, color, density, and imperfections.
We as statues look out into the world, and do not see our own shape. We as people, however, also have the ability to look inside, and see what’s there, what was never shaped by outside forces, to remain same and
enduring.
There could be a hollow within the stone, a huge imperfection, even another kind of stone - what’s inside influnces the way stresses outside act against
the stone; for some, the stresses manifest outwardly, shaped by the inner content of the stone - for others, the symptoms of the compound stresses [both good and bad], aren’t readily apparent. For others, there are no visible symptoms.
However, even given the ability to look inside, exact shape cannot be known. We have no eyes to see the boundary of outside and inside, even if we can look at either side and thus gain an inkling of shape.
So we end up with a Johari window set up, which makes sense, actually. But being the creatures of duality that we are [the mind, after all, operates on mostly nothing but duality], we end up as walking contradictions - how this is possible lies in the fact that one can never see the whole picture of a person at any one time because no such picture exists; half of who we are lies in already preconceived notions of other people - the viewers of the statue - and how we react to those notions - whether to confirm or deny
them. No one can see the statue in a single instant. One has to spend time walking around it and over and under and… Well, you get the point.
From the viewers we can glean a better picture of who we are [the social mirror], who we were, who we are become, and who we want to become. When someone sees us as, say, smart, in your post’s example, then we
become smart. Are we truly smart? Maybe, maybe not. But the contact goes both ways.
Once we set in action an event that denies intelligence, we are also left with a mark of that notion that we are - we become, bit by small bit,
shaped into ‘intelligent’.
In the end, what we are is ourselves, but only half of who we are is ourselves. That is why we are social beings - without others around, we are only half of who we are. [tangent] It reminds me of Xenogears, one
winged angels only able to fly with another… [/tangent]
Really… Tell this friend of yours that showing the whole of herself to a person isn’t so scary as she thinks. Intellectual relationship in may be, but men don’t say ‘I love you’ for the sake of saying it. Not the ones I know, at least. In the end, it’s up to her - is the risk really that great, in relation to the possible rewards?
March 24th, 2005 at 13:19
Afterthought : Pasalihin mo silang dalawa sa PTM, tapos ivolunteer mo sa mga committee. With all the stress of the preparations, they’ll definitely see each other uberdorky, stressed, snapping, depressed, jubilant, and any other mood you can throw at them, for sure.
Tapos, meron pa tayong mga bagong members.
March 29th, 2005 at 20:27
ano to? pm me. kwento kwento!