Emotional processing: friendship, trust.
Aug. 11th, 2011 10:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinI don't make friends easily.
I have a hard time believing that people actually like me... or that they really want me around that much, even if they have some fondness for me. This goes back to something in my childhood... well, a lot of things in my childhood, though there's one particularly vivid moment where I first realized that being in the same class as people and doing things with them at school didn't mean they were my "friends", and that even people who hung out with me outside of school didn't necessarily want to be too closely associated with me in the eyes of anyone else.
I don't go through life paranoid and watching for people to stab me in the back. It's more like I'm always afraid on some level that I'm inflicting myself on people, that if I like them and they also kind of like me, the best thing I can do is give them a ton of space so that I don't stretch what tolerance they have for my presence too far.
I do better with individuals than with groups, in this regard. I have an easier time believing that one person actually enjoys my presence than two, or three, or four. I could probably do a whole sidepost about how it complicates dealing with one's own fandom, when the larger the group of people, the harder it is to believe they actually like you. It's no wonder I'm so often reluctant to check the comments, even when they're almost uniformly lovely.
Anyway, I've gotten better about this sort of thing in recent years, especially as I've started analyzing it like this. There have been times and places where I've overcome it completely for a while. But it's still there. It's still part of who I am and how I interact with the world.
And here's what I'm left with, in the moments when I'm not dealing with my reactions more central to the rape itself: I believed that Caoimhe was my friend. Without a doubt. I mean, in a way that I haven't been able to convince myself that other people are. With most of my friends, I have my moments of wondering if they're sorry that they ever caught my attention and they're just too nice to say anything about the way I've glommed on to them. And there is no easy way of convincing myself otherwise, because... well, if they tell me otherwise, it's just that same niceness, isn't it? And now I've gone and been all insecure at them...
But with Caoimhe? I was convinced. She professed to like my ideas, she shared my interests, we had the same sense of humor... I've since learned that the last one, at least, was a forced affectation, and I'm pretty sure the first one was, too.
Now, of course, irony reveals herself in all her splendid glory: of course I believed her where I have a hard time believing others. She was lying, so she was trying to be believed. People who are telling the truth as a matter of course don't take pains to make themselves convincing.
What eats at me now... what kept me up in the middle of the night the other night... is wondering about her motive. Was she pretending to be my friend as part of her manipulative games... or was she pretending those things because that was the only way she knew how to be my friend, because she actually did like me and want to be liked by me in particular?
Chances are she never much cared for me. Maybe at the outset she thought I was bigger or more influential in the social justice circles she moves in than I really am. Maybe she saw someone she wanted an in with randomly make reference to me. Maybe she just wanted in on a new D&D game and she reflexively cozens up to DMs. I don't know. After she met Jack, I'm quite sure part of her motivation in keeping up an apparent friendship with me was to stay in his good graces, but why did she reach out to me in the first place?
"Was it all a game, or was it only mostly a game?" seems like a strange thing to care about, I'm sure. In a big objective long-view sense it doesn't matter if she was ever my friend or not, because she certainly wouldn't be my friend after what she did.
But it matters to me, because when it comes to real friends, plus or minus one is not a statistical blip. It matters because it seemed like the kind of easy and trusting and innocent friendship I haven't had since I was a child.
I don't think that this is going to have much impact on my ability to trust people in general, just because people in general aren't Caoimhe.
Someone left a comment on one of my posts... I believe it's screened, and in any event I'm not going to go wading back through them all to find it... that said something like, "When you want to trust someone, don't." That can be taken to mean "Trust no one", but given the number of times I've said or thought "I want to like Caoimhe", I think I understand what they mean.
The thing is that I had plenty of reasons not to trust her, even if I thought she was doing valuable work as an activist or whatever (and even that view of her is hard to defend once critically examined). I trusted her because I wanted to believe I'd found that kind of a friend.
Anyway, this is what keeps going around in my head: was any of it real? Did she have any actual fondness for me? The good times that I remember with the four of us together in real life, the times when she seemed to be enjoying herself and our company... were they really good times for her or was it all a mask?
NB: This post is labeled "emotional processing" for a reason. I'm not expecting answers or advice. Writing all this out is my way of dealing with it.
I have a hard time believing that people actually like me... or that they really want me around that much, even if they have some fondness for me. This goes back to something in my childhood... well, a lot of things in my childhood, though there's one particularly vivid moment where I first realized that being in the same class as people and doing things with them at school didn't mean they were my "friends", and that even people who hung out with me outside of school didn't necessarily want to be too closely associated with me in the eyes of anyone else.
I don't go through life paranoid and watching for people to stab me in the back. It's more like I'm always afraid on some level that I'm inflicting myself on people, that if I like them and they also kind of like me, the best thing I can do is give them a ton of space so that I don't stretch what tolerance they have for my presence too far.
I do better with individuals than with groups, in this regard. I have an easier time believing that one person actually enjoys my presence than two, or three, or four. I could probably do a whole sidepost about how it complicates dealing with one's own fandom, when the larger the group of people, the harder it is to believe they actually like you. It's no wonder I'm so often reluctant to check the comments, even when they're almost uniformly lovely.
Anyway, I've gotten better about this sort of thing in recent years, especially as I've started analyzing it like this. There have been times and places where I've overcome it completely for a while. But it's still there. It's still part of who I am and how I interact with the world.
And here's what I'm left with, in the moments when I'm not dealing with my reactions more central to the rape itself: I believed that Caoimhe was my friend. Without a doubt. I mean, in a way that I haven't been able to convince myself that other people are. With most of my friends, I have my moments of wondering if they're sorry that they ever caught my attention and they're just too nice to say anything about the way I've glommed on to them. And there is no easy way of convincing myself otherwise, because... well, if they tell me otherwise, it's just that same niceness, isn't it? And now I've gone and been all insecure at them...
But with Caoimhe? I was convinced. She professed to like my ideas, she shared my interests, we had the same sense of humor... I've since learned that the last one, at least, was a forced affectation, and I'm pretty sure the first one was, too.
Now, of course, irony reveals herself in all her splendid glory: of course I believed her where I have a hard time believing others. She was lying, so she was trying to be believed. People who are telling the truth as a matter of course don't take pains to make themselves convincing.
What eats at me now... what kept me up in the middle of the night the other night... is wondering about her motive. Was she pretending to be my friend as part of her manipulative games... or was she pretending those things because that was the only way she knew how to be my friend, because she actually did like me and want to be liked by me in particular?
Chances are she never much cared for me. Maybe at the outset she thought I was bigger or more influential in the social justice circles she moves in than I really am. Maybe she saw someone she wanted an in with randomly make reference to me. Maybe she just wanted in on a new D&D game and she reflexively cozens up to DMs. I don't know. After she met Jack, I'm quite sure part of her motivation in keeping up an apparent friendship with me was to stay in his good graces, but why did she reach out to me in the first place?
"Was it all a game, or was it only mostly a game?" seems like a strange thing to care about, I'm sure. In a big objective long-view sense it doesn't matter if she was ever my friend or not, because she certainly wouldn't be my friend after what she did.
But it matters to me, because when it comes to real friends, plus or minus one is not a statistical blip. It matters because it seemed like the kind of easy and trusting and innocent friendship I haven't had since I was a child.
I don't think that this is going to have much impact on my ability to trust people in general, just because people in general aren't Caoimhe.
Someone left a comment on one of my posts... I believe it's screened, and in any event I'm not going to go wading back through them all to find it... that said something like, "When you want to trust someone, don't." That can be taken to mean "Trust no one", but given the number of times I've said or thought "I want to like Caoimhe", I think I understand what they mean.
The thing is that I had plenty of reasons not to trust her, even if I thought she was doing valuable work as an activist or whatever (and even that view of her is hard to defend once critically examined). I trusted her because I wanted to believe I'd found that kind of a friend.
Anyway, this is what keeps going around in my head: was any of it real? Did she have any actual fondness for me? The good times that I remember with the four of us together in real life, the times when she seemed to be enjoying herself and our company... were they really good times for her or was it all a mask?
NB: This post is labeled "emotional processing" for a reason. I'm not expecting answers or advice. Writing all this out is my way of dealing with it.
no subject
on 2011-08-11 09:29 pm (UTC)No one will never know how she actually felt about you except her, and alas that we cannot trust whatever she says. But it's certainly not a strange thing to wonder, especially in the current working-things-through section of things.