I’ve made a discovery concerning myself. It is something I’ve been aware of for some time already but I was never sure enough to fully believe my insights. Now, however, I’m certain. And I feel… so light-hearted and free.
Now take a moment to read this caption.
“This is how love was, now: Arnold sat and imagined he was being observed tenderly from an unapproachable distance by Amanda. She was everywhere and nowhere at once, watching him, as he sat here smoking on his beach, or whistling a tune in the shower, or listening to a lecture in class on the evils of Evolutionary Psychology. No matter where he went or what he did, Amanda was with him, and this sense of being observed, even as he slept, produced in Arnold a constant, consuming exhilaration from which there was no relief.
Not that he sought relief. In fact, he reveled in the excitement of love as only a teenager can, scrawling page after page of poetry in Amanda’s honor, sending hundreds of messages to her phone every day (which she never replied to, thankfully, because to have real contact with her, to start an actual dialogue, would ruin everything, and this was understood intuitively by Arnold and all the kids he knew).” (caption from God Is Dead by Ron Currie Jr.)
I wouldn’t go quite as far as Arnold in that caption, and my ‘love’ could only be described as a crush but otherwise, my thoughts are exactly like that. And this is the way my crushes work: the excitement, the suspension, even the pain it sometimes causes, they’re all gone the moment there is an actual contact between me and the other person involved (aka the object of the crush). The magic is ruined and gone, and then there’s just reality.
I don’t mean to say that getting to know someone for real is a bad thing, of course not, but when my crushes have no other basis than the imaginary world I’ve created for them, then they die when the image dies – when dreams get their wings clipped off by reality.
I used to be very sensitive about this, it would give me severe physical (not to mention mental) pain for days on end, and recovery was slow. As I’ve become more and more aware of myself and my self-esteem has increased tremendously, ‘getting over’ has become much easier. I don’t wallow in self-pity anymore, I don’t call myself stupid for letting myself indulge in dreams that were doomed right from the beginning. And, most importantly, I don’t think real life is unfair for being something else than my (day)dreams.
Crushes are crushes, and nothing more, and that’s good; how dull would life be if there weren’t these spikes of excitement from time to time? Remember that young man I’ve mentioned a couple of times, who works next to me, who is really cute? Yes, well he’s in a relationship. You’d think that was when I realised everything I’ve written thus far, but no, actually it all came to me before I learned he was taken. It was the moment I sent him a message on Facebook (just to ask how he was, nothing very interesting :)). Of course I didn’t realise it then, but that was the moment when reality took over imagination. It got real, and now I feel like I had been blindfolded before. Sure he’s cute, I would never deny that, but would I really want to be more than friends? No. I bet he’s a great guy, and I’m a great girl, but that’s about it. I was never interested in him particularly, I was just intoxicated by the idea of having a crush on someone.
Why I’m writing all this, is because this is the first time that I’ve really felt only positive vibes about everything concerning the matter; I’m not disappointed at all that he’s taken – I bet he’s happy and that’s great, I don’t feel stupid for daydreaming – at least it kept me busy for a while ;), it wasn’t painful at all to ‘accept’ the reality of things. And I don’t feel down, at all.