Seek gatekeepers, not tour guides

The thing about information is once you share it, it’s no longer just ‘yours’. You’ve passed it on, you’ve copied the key. You select who you share it with, but by doing so hope, pray, that they will treat it with the same security you do. You hand over the key and hope that they don’t find another locksmith. Hope they act as a guard to the castle, not a tour guide.

The story and details will never be the same coming from another’s lips. They can’t. All their background, experience, and bias slowly morphing it into something else. Morphing it into their own.

When you pass on information, it’s no longer yours.

We don’t pass out copies of our house key without strong consideration, but our hearts, our minds, our goals, and fears, those keys seem to be cut much quicker. Maybe not something huge, maybe not our deepest darkest secrets, but the locks keep turning, one by one. Soon, you don’t know who holds a key or the dreaded copy of a copy.

It’s far worse than telephone, being known, or assumed to be known. Telephone there’s hesitation, are you sure that’s what was said? You get to the end of the line… hesitate… announce what you heard… but safely add a question mark. When people hold a key, they assume it works, it’s right, it’s been cut by machine. There’s no static, no wires to be crossed.

I’ve had to learn that copying keys is no safe business.

Seek gatekeepers, not tour guides.

Boiled down to bullet points

“Is he husband material or is he a waste of time?”, “7 Signs he’s into you”, “Is he really worth it?”. Facebook seems to think my forever “single” status, means I want/need to be bombarded with lists clarifying what makes a guy worth it or not. But really, if you have to turn to a list online over a guy, you’re probably not going to like the answer. What once littered the shelves in grocery store check out lines scrawled across Cosmo and Seventeen, is now repeated all over Buzzfeed and Elite Daily. The same articles, different words. When did trusting your gut go by the way side? Why trust a generic list over what’s in front of you? We get it, guys and gals communicate differently, but if you can’t communicate at all, RUN. Maybe the lists are what some people need for that final call to action or maybe they just continue to cause more drama than their worth. You wouldn’t ask a stranger on the street for relationship advice, so why ask a list? Thanks for your help Facebook, but I think I’ll stick to my own experiences.

But his texts are just SO sweet.

There’s the saying I can be whoever I want online. We can create personas and make people believe we are whoever we want to be. But the same goes the other way. We can make someone whoever we want them to be online. I’m not suggesting that we are creating faux profiles for other people, but we are building these fantasy people through what we see, rather than what we experience. We are willing to accept and mentally embellish what people give us through technology. We convince ourselves we know people better than we do because we can see their lives unfold before us on our timelines. We can often see this flaw in others, but rarely recognize it in ourselves. I hear girls tell me how sweet it is that they got a good night text or how he’s clearly thinking about her and cares so much, when he can’t be bothered to make time to see her. Can he really care that much if he’s not willing to make an effort? There is little effort in texting someone, if they’re consistently not responding or reaching out, it’s not because they’re busy, it’s because they don’t want to. We would rather construct a plethora of excuses for why they can’t talk to us, rather than admit the obvious, that they don’t want to. It’s easier to think he didn’t see your text than to accept that he ignored it.

When we can depend on social media for varying degrees of contact, it creates this false sense that we have more contact with someone than we actually do. He favorited my tweet, he’s obviously interested in what I’m doing! People ingest posts and pictures online like they were meant specifically for them.  We willingly accept text conversations over face to face interaction and choose to update people through the internet, rather than in person. How many times have we been told by friends or told a friend to “go look at my wall, post, tweet, etc”. They wanted you to see it, but then again they wanted everyone else to see it too. There’s so much you miss in a conversation without the face to face aspect. In texts and post we can edit and photoshop to our hearts desire. Imagine what we’d know if we could see everything that was backspaced? Or better yet, watch the expression on someone’s face when they have to immediately react to what you’ve just said. You can throw your phone away after sending a risky text, but it’s not socially acceptable to throw someone after saying something risky. Or I guess more realistically we would walk away. If you got up and walked away from someone every time you said something honest, people would probably start suggesting counseling. And if you tried to throw someone every time, you would have an extensive police record.

We laugh or pity those on shows like Catfish, but we’re all guilty of falling for technology tricks. People seem so much more witty or caring or even rude online. Are we being more honest online or are we all characters? Be more honest with your friends and yourself when you catch yourself building someone to something they aren’t because of technology. Let’s put more value in actions and less into pretty words. https://katienem.wordpress.com/2014/09/12/build-me-a-castle/

Flawed Expectations

Sometimes the only thing you can depend on a person to be is the same. That can come as a comfort or disappointment. We often want people to change their negative qualities without altering their good ones. It isn’t always impossible for people to change, but they often don’t want to. We become comfortable with who we are and make excuses for our negative qualities. If enough people stick around, we find no need to change. We find ways to mask these qualities or lessen them to a degree, but rarely do we ever really extinguish them. They will eventually come creeping back out.

The problem is not in having flaws, but comes from expecting people or ourselves to eradicate all flaws. No one is perfect, no one is without flaws, some people simply do a better job of hiding theirs or compensating for them. Some flaws come from habits or lack of maturity, but the ones we have the biggest issue with are those of character. Not objectively having a good or bad character, but what makes us who we are, our traits, and our priorities.

Time is wasted waiting around for someone to change who they are so they can fit into our compartmentalized lives. We rarely see people as who they are, but who we want them to be. When they fail to meet these standards or their character flaws show their face, we expect them to change. We don’t want them to change for their benefit, but for our own. We want them to fit in this mold we have made for them, their priorities to match ours, and their goals to become one with ours. This speaks less to the flaws of others and more to the ones we find within ourselves. We would rather have someone else bend to meet our expectations than reflect on who we truly are. We aren’t meant to get along with everyone, not everyone deserves a permanent place in our lives or us in theirs.

We cling to the idea of who someone is, rather than acknowledging the person that stands right in front of us. We beg, plead, and push for them to become the person we want them to be. For a while it may work, but we can only hide our true selves for so long. Soon their so called “flaws” come to the surface again. Maybe subtly at first, but slowly regaining their original strength and then some. We feel angry, betrayed, how could they go back to being that person? But wasn’t it us, who betrayed them? Forcing them to be something they aren’t to fill a void in our own lives. Maybe, just maybe, someone else’s flaws aren’t their problem, but one we create for ourselves by the expectations we have made from our own standard of living. It’s more comforting believing you’re living right and everyone else is wrong because we know how hard it is to change.