I put people in boxes.
My incessant need to be hyperorganized carries into the social aspect of my life more than necessary, categorizing every single individual with whom I come into contact and saving each person as a file placed into a specifically-designated location on my social roster based on personal history, interactions, behaviors, and a heavily-weighted list of pros and cons in regards to my own personal growth.
The problem with this is that I am always caught off guard and never know how to best react when the boxes in which I place these people suddenly cease to reflect the ideals I had initially hung around their neck.
While I own the fact that I myself am volatile and inconsistent, it’s a harder pill to swallow when believing others are, as well.
I crave stability, consistency— mostly, I reckon, because I lack a lot of it in regards to the foundation of my own life, so I go looking for it through my relationships and daily interactions with other people.
There are persons in my roster who definitely fill the quota of the boxes in which I place them and seldom if ever exceed the expectations I have of them that come with having been placed in a specific box.
These are the people I tend to take for granted, not appreciating what their grounding impact possesses in my life until I am no longer on the receiving end of it, or when I begin to realize the other boxes have become too small or just wrong for those for whom I created it.
It’s not my nature to initially believe that everyone out there is a dynamic human being, each individual capable of change and transcendence.
I subconsciously prefer to seek out those who carry out their existence as means to portray the “background,” perhaps to give me a setting to prove my own character dynamics, or perhaps to feed into my Reichian character structure of the schizoid*.
I constantly seek to feel safe, and what better to provide me with a pacifying feeling than a calm and grounded person to off-set my volatile and inconsistent ways?
It is within this setting do I feel most safest, most myself.
This is perhaps the reason why although I enjoy the company and adventures of loud, outgoing people, I am never one-hundred percent content when I am with them and am, in fact, rather threatened and left feeling weak and vulnerable.
This feeling of vulnerability and overall notion of being at a loss affects me the most when the people I had categorized as calm and collected (or other variations of stability and groundedness) prove spontaneously to be other than what I had previously considered them to be.
Such an unexpected realization can have a profoundly traumatizing effect on my psyche. While it can be boiled down to something superficial as a freak-out (What happened? Who is this person?), its repercussions travel deeper than what my surface portrays.
You are not who I thought you were. Our relationship is a scam. I've lost my trust in you. I no longer feel safe with you.
Sadly this is an experience I keep going through repeatedly, sometimes with the same person, but I keep at it.
This process helps to reevaluate my relationship with someone, sometimes allowing to remove them from the box I originally placed them and moving them to a bigger box with more room to grow, more room for trust.
Other times upon reevaluation, the box is simply discarded altogether without second thought, along with the person it contained.
But it’s the most hardest when I have to force myself to move those from a box closest to my heart to another one much farther.
* see next post
