Pondering Intensity

December 1, 2011

Apparently, I am intense.

I use “pensive” to describe my inner self. But I mentioned this to someone in my family who knows me well, and she laughed and said “true, but you’re also intense.”

I denied it.

Then agreed.

Then thought about it and disagreed again.

And that set in motion a day days of reflection about what this means. It’s not that I wanted it to, but sometimes our minds take off with or without our permission.

How many times do you have to hear something someone else thinks about you before you believe it?

In my life, the most weight gets assigned to how I feel about myself… after that, it goes to my closest family members because they have the benefit of history to back up their perception… after them, my best friend because she’s the most critically thinking person I know. Then? Way, way, way, way later? Other folks.

If I ask you your opinion, I’m going to consider it. If I don’t solicit it, but you give it anyway, I might consider it. But lately I’ve heard the same general sentiment coming from multiple people:

You’re intense.

You’re a lot.

You’re difficult. <— that one stung, probably because I assign negative value to it.

So here I am pondering my identity as always, lol.

I have always been… a handful. But I guess because my intensity is not isolated… meaning, yeah- I’m an intense person- but I also love intensely, care/feel intensely, screw intensely…it’s just… who I am… I’ve never assigned negative value to this quality… and that might be because the general consensus has always been “yeah chunk is serious, but I fucks with her hard though.”

What I unknowingly demand in time, attention or advice, you get back x 2 (or 10 depending on who you are). But the problem with this is, new people in my life don’t have the benefit of knowing the reciprocity that will come with their patience… maybe this is how I weed people out?

Quickly, easily.

I have intense friendships… intense family connectedness. In real life, I scarcely operate in the shallowness required for non-intense interaction. In fact, until fairly recently, I either loved you completely or gave you no interaction at all… arrogantly aloof and shit, supposedly. And looking back, I agree. It was hard… really hard… for someone to get to my inner vault if they hadn’t been there for quite some time. But the thing is, it wasn’t about walls… it was about knowing my emotional limitations… my way of being simply didn’t allow for me to interact with a bunch of different people. In other words, the amount of attention, thought, and time I’m going to give you is substantial.. and I can’t do that for everybody… cause there aren’t enough hours in the day. And what may be crazy is that you didn’t have to offer me that in return for me to offer it to you… because while it’s who I am, it might not be who you are… and I try not to expect more from people than they can reasonably give.

Casual intimacy… is new for me… the talking regularly with people who haven’t known me for many years is foreign to me… and I’m starting to think I’m incapable of it. Well, not incapable… but I find it challenging.  When I was younger, I had a “we don’t flow so why even talk to each other?” attitude. I had/have enough people in my life where I simply don’t need/have room for “light” (meaning, people who talk to you but really don’t care about you one way or another) friendships or boyfriends. And I’m –>this<– close to going back to that…

Except… there’s a nagging problem with that:

If you only ever interact with who you’ve always interacted with and do things the way you’ve always done them, you just might end up only with the shit you’ve always gotten… and while I am extremely proud of where I am, it doesn’t mean I don’t want to try something new… new thoughts and ideas are probably more easily generated by integrating new people into my life… but that is an extremely hard thing for me to do.

Written by chunk Posted in neurosis