In the same way that life sometimes repeats its ugliest patterns, I keep getting songs stuck in my head. Last night and when I got up today, it was Aimee Mann – “Amateur”
“Despite conclusions I drew/
There was a chance you’d surprise me…”
But there are never really any surprises – and somehow that still surprises me!
I am frustrated by my propensity for cultivating and caring for people, friends, etc. and feeling that it is never really returned. It is not always that these people don’t care but has more to do with their priorities being different, their inability to compartmentalize time enough to really dedicate themselves to or focus on one thing at a time. I suppose I get hurt by this at times because, with people where it really matters, I have carved out time and energy to devote to them without expecting (well, thinking I am not expecting anything anyway) the same in return. Because in the moments I devote to them, to friendship or love or what have you, that is my priority. Granted maybe my approach right now is selfish and assumes that others act on friendship as I do. Assumes that they care as much as I do. And I know this is not always the case because I have been on the other side of the equation – I care but not enough to make time, etc.
Perhaps what wounds me more is when I recognize that this pattern has repeated throughout my life. No matter how busy I am, how much work I take on, how many deadlines pile up, no matter how much travel I must do, I am careful to carve out time, reliably, when I care. If I can do that, then how is it that people who swear up and down that I am important to them and who have nowhere near the time constraints that I do (unless they are concealing a lot of information from me, which is perfectly possible) cannot? They seem to disappear from the face of the earth in what feels like precisely the only moments we could have had together.
The bigger question, then, is why am I agonizing and giving it so much importance and attention when clearly the feeling involved is not mutual?