An unsolicited, unrequested, and hopefully unnoticed response on an old friends thoughts on moving cities:
I post here less and less these days
I moved here again properly nearly 3 years ago - I love this city. There is always something new to see, or to explore. I am in no rush to leave. But I miss being in my garden 3000 kilometres away.
In year 11 psychology we covered Carl Rogers, and it clicked in a way good theories do - touching something that makes you go âhuh, thatâs so obvious, why hasnât anyone thought of that beforeâ.
Carl was a humanist - proposed that everyone had three things: A self that you were, a self you wanted to be, and the self that met in the middle. Experience, awareness and self concept. He proposed self actualisation was the complete overlapping of these things.
Sitting in that class, with the amount of teen angst only generated by mental health issues that were diagnosed before that was cool can produce, it struck me that everyone I enjoyed the company of seemed to have the circles of their selves overlap in a way I knew I couldnât project. The class divided, the world divided: those whose selves came closer to aligning or split into some chromatic aberration of personal uncertainty. Those who could project self assuredness and those who could only mimic it, and the scale between those two extremes.
I think this is what people refer to when they say: donât cringe, kill the part of you that cringes. Align your selves, because people notice when you havenât.
I think a lot of people do psychology degrees because they think it will teach them how to fix themselves in a way that feels impersonal. Itâs easier to view your own perceived flaws as something that can be psychologically evaluated and explained. Cognitive dissonance taught at the tertiary level. But there is truth that psychology can be only be used to navigate the social through a specific lens, like trying to feel the open sea from a watchtower at the dock. Youâre never going to be able to truly understand, or experience, the spray.
I read over an old friends blog, he put into words what I spent a lot of my life not being able to pin - we both treated growing a community as a personal challenge. Itâs an easy habit to form when you feel like youâve created a personality rather than having an inate one - and itâs so antithetical to how relationships actually work. Friends are not pokemon. And finding a partner isnât a performance improvement plan - they cannot be gained and checked off a list. Human relationships are, by nature, symbiotic. They inform each other. Water someoneâs grass and they will water yours yes, but only water their grass out of obligation and theyâll only water it back out of obligation. A true friendship cannot be rushed, collected and neglected to plant the next seed. It requires time and age and endless interest: gladly consistently and intentionally given - especially when itâs hard. An urge to care and maintain rather than simply collect and understand. You cannot plant an apple tree, eat all the fruit it can provide, and expect the apple tree not to see it as a transaction.
Ironically the desire to have more friends doesnât translate to making them for this reason - you cannot fake mutality. You cannot understand the sea from port.
I guess what Iâm saying is that anyone trying to âmake more friendsâ creates a power dynamic before you even begin an interaction - and no stable relationship can be built on opposite altitudes - even if those altitudes are self imposed. Itâs a catch 22.
My hormones have settled since year 11 psychology. Where I thought Iâd always emit magenta, yellow, and cyan - I can feel the removal of the prism I imposed on myself to split the beam. I have lived long enough to notice when someoneâs outward brightness blinds from the fact that their selves hues are divided. I am peaceful in a way I never thought Iâd live to experience. I have stopped trying to look behind the curtain of my own existence.
But I see it in others - this desire to consume peopleâs attention and conversation in an almost capitalistic sense - to be not only your own voyeur, but your own brand ambassador. Putting your own perception above all else
So I post here less. I donât need to be perceived to be understood. I like what I like, when I like it. Even as the undulating current of modern social engagement brings more and more people to do what feels like the opposite.
My garden is watered not because it provides me fruit - but because I enjoy the act of watering. I cannot recommend learning how to do that enough.
The only things to cringe, is cringe itself
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