Stop clinging onto small similarities that might maybe create a friendship of some description if you kept your mind open and gave them a chance…

I don’t know if you are anything like me, but… Let me write another somewhat personal post that might prove useful to some of you.

I am a very complicated, multifaceted person, with a high IQ and many different talents and interests. It feels NEAR IMPOSSIBLE to find people who would be “like me”. My differences are also the kind that nobody in their right mind would want to change about themselves, who would like to be less intelligent, less beautiful, less interested in things, less diverse… Just to fit in? In our previous incarnations, it made perfect sense to try and find commonalities with whoever was there, right? No internet, no dating sites, no VAST VARIETY in people available in your fingertips, right?

Still, our evolution says: Focus on the detail. You’ll find SOMETHING in common with anyone.

Moment of realization

I don’t know if you know, but I have this OBSESSION over Second Life character’s sizes. I NEED PEOPLE to stop making their avatars 2 meters tall by DEFAULT. (2 meters is a very, very tall man, FYI, but on Second Life, even women are rarely shorter than 2 meters.) I’ve been thinking of building locations specifically based on people’s avatar sizes, as in, for normal-sized human avatars. So I was at this club that is always full of people on Second Life looking at this female avatar who was tons shorter than the man she was dancing with thinking “Oh she must feel the way I do.” Wondering if I should IM her to ask her to join my 1:1 scale group.

Then it dawned on me: I have to stop making small similarities the reason to reach out and hope it will be enough to make a friend. And even though a group is a group, the reason why I tend to want to create them is to find some kind of a connection, to make some kind of a friend, to feel somehow connected to other people and less… Lonely.

Time for a new attitude

However, as logical as that sounds, it’s an old way of thinking. Even if logically, we know: “OK, this is now, these friends are temporary or casual,” at least I have this HOPE, this not really real hope but hoping against hope, a desperate obsessive hope that maybe one day I’ll be pleasantly surprised by one of you. I never am. People ALWAYS wind up being… What I expect them to be, just normal, not terrible, not amazing… Except when I already know, at a glance, that they’ll knock my socks off. Like Ari effin’ Pakarinen! How can you tell, by a glance, that this person would be one of the most INTERESTING people you’ve ever even READ about let alone had the chance to talk to? Someone who makes others think you’re full of shit just telling you about the events of his life.

I, at least, KNOW EXACTLY what to expect when I see a person for the first time. I need one look in their eyes and I know. At times, I’ve tried to tell myself it’s stupid, but it isn’t. I always know, and then I wind up annoyed at myself when I force myself to HOPE someone would be better than what I know them to be by a glance. We measure each other up, and if you’re anything like me; accurately. And I know there’s a lot of people who hate that thought. They HATE ME for even saying so, I can feel their arguments and objections as I write this. I’ll log them into another blog later.

If you are like me, and you know you know… Stop wasting time on those little similarities that you can find in basically anyone. One short avatar among 200 giants a friend does not make.

Subscribe to get a Daily Message