Jan 13, 2010

She informed me that I had to understand because she was insecure. This girl was insecure. Very very fragile, and all I could feel was resentment. I was almost awash in this annoyance that rude or dismissive behavior can be dismissed under the easy banner of insecurity and I couldn't entirely understand my ire until I delved deep into the realization that I just didn't buy it. I couldn't feel sympathy because I was too awash in a certain self hating empathy. She is insecure. *I* am insecure. You will find very few people as insecure as me.
I have pondered this. I know this is wrong.
Even though the statement feels right I know it is wrong.
And then I ponder that everyone is insecure on some level, and that statement while it sounds right, feels true to say might also the wrong. Given that we are, reasonably, using a term with relative value, which is to say if someone is insecure, someone else has to be secure to give the spectrum relative meaning, I have to assume there are a great deal of people perfectly confident and a certain amount of people barely able to leave their homes in the morning. Gracious outgoing superstars rounding out one side and someone shaking quietly in a corner on the other.
So perhaps it is unfair, given the multiple levels of horrible horrible insecurities I can imagine to say no one is more insecure than me. I can leave the house, I can speak infront of a crowd with the right chemical cocktail, I can tell certain people I love them without running to the bathroom and freaking out. I can handle myself. For the most part, is fair to say, my insecurity does not rise to the level of intense neurosis or fragility.
But I am, quite actually, very insecure. And as such I walk around with a certain intense hope that I will not encounter too terribly much that will knock my fragile ego down another notch. I navigate with this specific aim. I fear new groups, I never call first, and I very very much do not want to get up infront of people and dance dance revolution that you very much. I very much fear looking into your eyes and reading what you think of me. Get it?
And also, as such, I try not to make insecure people feel bad. Which is to say: even if I can't quite get it up to be outgoing, I try to be reasonably friendly. I attempt to be kind. I don't flirt with other people's boyfriends. I don't start conversations that one particular person has no hope of joining, I don't pretend people aren't standing infront of me. Even though sometimes I want to. Even though sometimes I close my eyes and want to make more than just me invisible in order to take a deep breath and decompress in the middle of a crowd.

And you want to know insecure: I am perfectly convinced that most people find my somewhere between alienating and deeply dull. I am reasonably convinced your average man finds me as attractive as a springer spaniel, I can hardly imagine that invitations naturally include me, I am pretty much sure you aren't talking to ME.

I GET it.

And so someone is insecure. And I am supposed to give them slack because they are insecure. Even though they just took their insecurity out on me. Even though they just effectively communicated my complete lack of value to me. Even though they just made me FEEL MORE INSECURE.

No, fuck that. Alot of people insecure. ALOT of people I know.
And they manage to not do that.

It's called managing your insecurity. And if you can't do that there is also a name for that, and that is called being rude.

It's not that you can't be rude and insecure. It's that they are not the same thing. And you learn to manage one to spare the fall out of the other.

There. I said it. And now I am a terribly unsympathetic person. A terribly unsympathetic insecure person. Yes, now you know.

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