Sharing this thing that actually got me thinking about a plot for new Steve x Gregg fic (dramaaa).
There goes the subject, carrying a mountain of scenes, imagined versions, rehearsed responses, and messages they never sent. The problem is not always that the other person isn't listening; sometimes it is that we have turned the other into the mandatory recipient of everything we haven't finished saying to ourselves.
Piera Aulagnier wrote that psychic life needs a space where experience can be represented and thought through. When that space narrows, the urgency to deposit the content into someone else appears. Not to communicate, but to offload.
Meanwhile, Donald Winnicott warned that one of the most sophisticated forms of dependency consists in believing that only one specific person can receive what we carry inside.
The romantic and at the same time tragic aspect of everyday life: walking miles with a box that the other person never asked to open.
Perhaps maturing is not finding someone who listens to everything. Perhaps it is learning that some stories need an interlocutor, and others need processing.
