FALSE ATTACHMENTS

You meet a random stranger, smile, and for a moment the warmth makes you forget that the memory does not extend beyond that smile.

Someone said “people build relatability” It is like the relationship we have with celebrities in our head because we watch them every day and relate with them on screen, we feel like we know them. It is like friends we make on Instagram but do not know in our daily lives. We see their post, follow their lives through every update and feel like we are sharing their lives too but the thing we easily dismiss is how this is just a part.

Most people hide behind covers. Layers and layers of privacy that they shed depending on the audience and even when they are not trying to be private some things just feel secretive. They are not exactly good or bad, just stuff one would rather be the only one privy to, which is why it is futile to imagine that we know someone completely.

I think this is why betrayal hurts so much. We build this idea of a person in our minds and they turn out to be totally different. Is it their fault that we built expectations of them that they don’t identify with? Does it make them liars if we made assumptions about them based on the things we know that do not include all of them?

We are ready to put people in a box because it helps us to readily deal with them without having to evaluate them per situation and most time the choices are usually binary. Good or bad, vibe or no vibe, chill or too much, beautiful or ugly. Even as we make this label, I think we know in some parts of our minds that there are grey areas, that good people do bad things and bad people do good things, that some things are just as they are neither good nor bad depending on how we wield them. So, tell me why do we feel betrayed when we stick people in a box and they don’t seem to fit?

The first reaction is to dismiss them and reduce them to liars, pretenders, or bad people. This labelling is the most convenient but not necessarily the most holistic. They may just have been human with a moment of weakness that is just too hurtful for you to bear but in another context and with another person it may not be a big deal. What if they are also defining themselves based on events that happen, what if they also do not know where they belong? What if they are good people who made bad choices? What if they are just people and what that means is that they fall and rise or rise when they fall or rise then fall?

False attachments are like smokescreens, obscure but providing vision. We relate with people first in our minds before we actually relate with them in reality. We build up expectations based on our ideals and values and pick parts of them we see that seem to be adaptable to the things we can tolerate. We may eventually get to see that they are nothing like we imagined or we get lucky and they are exactly as we pictured them in our mind’s eye.

This post is about adapting to people as they are. It is about generosity, providing room for people to show you all the parts they come in without feeling smothered, judged, or unwanted, it is about acceptance, knowing that there are limits to which we can say we know a person with certainty. It is about patience and time, to wait it out till certain things run their course, it is about insight, knowing what to fix and what to adapt to, to know when to stay or when to walk away, to know who to fight for and who to run from. It is about harnessing allies and foes knowing each person has a role to play, it is about taking the lessons and leaving behind the pain or sometimes brandishing both. It is about adventure, taking the risk to go after what we think we deserve without settling, it is about discernment, knowing that not all beautiful stories end the same, and realizing that it is enough too.