A World Where People Say Nice Things

Posted on April 19, 2005 in Avoidance Disappointment

It’s supposed to be a good mantra to repeat “My worth does not depend on what other people think of me.” Yet every time I hear someone say “You’re a likeable guy,” I hurry away to cry or go silent. It’s not that I don’t think I’m a likeable guy. It’s that I don’t believe that they mean it. When you like someone, you call them, you make time to see them, etc. You keep your appointments. And people don’t do this for me. So I conclude that they don’t like me.

And it is hard, when you spend most of the day by yourself, thinking that this is unimportant. I feel like a candle with a wick burning through the wax but the wax never melts, a hollow tube filled with the flame of disappointment. When I get out among people, I often find myself shying into a corner. It’s strange: I can stand up and give a speech before a crowd of thousands without skipping a beat. I can sit in a group and deliver my opinion. But put me at a party or in an intimate group of three — I become the script lost in the darkness of the tomb. Without moving even an inch, I excuse myself from the conversation and hide in another dimension with a full view of everything that is happening around me.

One of the things I’ve been trying to make myself do lately is get out and meet people. Because of this, I have been rejected more in the past three months than I have in the entire span of years from 1995 to 2005. To some friends I said “Life is much easier when you shut up and hide”. Easier than being out in that world of people who say nice things about me and rarely act as if they mean it.

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To those friends from far away who have called or emailed me, thank you.