Musing on my Relationships, Chronically Adressed Resolutions

Jamie=delving deeper into the fact that interpersonal relationships are something that she seriously struggles with.

Beyond lacking basic social etiquette and giving strange impressions, there's a more fundamental problem there, I think. I've always been more introverted than extroverted, which is fine and in and of itself is not a problem with me. I like to think that I can think independently, logic aside. My deal, though, is that my introversion has gotten to be extreme enough that I do not have the capacity for healthy, mutual relationships with other people. I tend to take emotionally and materialistically and give next to nothing back. I aspire towards balance and fairness but am too hesitant and too unsympathetic to know what that really means on my end. I don't want to give up on it; there's no reason to! I'm a very young person with a great capacity to change. I want to find my own means of treating people and treating myself, because I find a lot of social standards to be irrelevant to how I've learned that I feel about things. There are some that I find make sense, though, that I want to work on. For example, don't let a new person in your life replace the Tried and True. The new don't have to earn you, but they ought to learn you. It's not fair to step into someone's life and immediately make demands of them. People already have so much internally to work out and it doesn't tend to help either party to add onto that persistent stress. Secondly, I want to start making some of the moves, so my friends can be assured of their importance to me, their value to me. It's not that I don't care enough to be the one to make plans. It's just that, as silly as it sounds, it often doesn't occur to me to do it because I enjoy my time alone as well. When I'm not stimulated socially, most of the time I'm internally stimulated and don't actively seek company. It's nothing personal and I don't mean to make you unsure of whether I'm engaged. It's still something to work on, though. I'm not very considerate of other people, in large part due to my lack of understanding to sympathize. Sometimes I oppose, and sometimes I'm just neutral because I haven't experienced what you're going through and don't have real advice. I would rather give advice from experience or from whatever I can offer as far as an objective standpoint goes, than empty advice that doesn't help or even reassure anyone.

I've realized that I really do have a hard time with superficial social matters. I would rather not put myself forth if I don't personally believe in my standpoint, which can also make me unsupportive. I don't think feigning an opinion is convincing when I do it, so I try to abstain from doing so whenever possible. Still could improve there, too, though.

I don't want people to feel obligated towards me when I'm figuring things out for myself, because I tend to close people out when I am doing so and may very well come to conclusions that are not kindly met by the people close to me. I don't want to push people away from me, but I don't want to pull them in if I can't even be sure that I can cater to them emotionally as I solidify my beliefs. The problem with all that is that I simply can't expect my friends to detach that way if they haven't already found a reason that would cause them to. The way I look at self discipline and responsibility does not tend to work for other people, which is understandable. It's a way of approaching things that can lead to taking on inordinate amounts of (hypothetical) responsibility, but also to being selfish. I don't ask that people bend to accommodate that, because it encompasses the idea of catering to one's own beliefs and not necessarily to others, but at least it can be known. It is y'all's choice as to how you would/will go about that.

~James