as small as a world and as large as alone

10:45pm September 16, 2014

natalunasans:

fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton:

Do you ever wake up one day and realize that the people who try to bully you are a thousand times more boring than they think they are?

(Nobody’s done anything to me lately, I was just reminiscing.) 

my mum’s worst insult, worse than “evil”, was BORING.

in this case, i will agree with her.

One thing I don’t understand – and neither does anyone who knows both me and my major bullies – is why they do it.  What motivates them.

Because… to me, what they are doing is profoundly boring.  It got old years ago.  I have not seen these people since I was 15 years old.  I am 34 now.  I have not had any contact with them of any kind since I was 18.

And yet.

They are still so interested in me that they try to ruin my life.

They are still so interested in me that they go to great lengths to make things up.  I mean, they make up different sets of lies to tell to different people to manipulate them in different ways.  This is not something effortless they are doing, they put a lot of work into molding together the truth with lies and half-truths to make it seem plausible to anyone who doesn’t see through them easily.

I honestly wonder sometimes…

Are they bothered by the fact that I never think about them unless the topic comes up, yet they seem to think about me, all the time?  Is that their goal, to make me think about them as much as they think about me?  To get my attention for some reason?

Why do they think about me at all?  I am not their friend, I was never their friend, they were bullies masquerading as friends.  I’ve made it abundantly clear that I want no contact with any of them.  I have moved on with my life and rarely think about them.  Why do they think about me?  Why do they care so much about me?

It makes no sense to me.

And they are profoundly, profoundly boring.  They do the same things over and over again.  I can already predict pretty much everything they’ll do in any situation.

There was a quote I always loved:  "Evil is boring.“

They are evil, and they are boring as hell.  (If hell exists, I bet boredom is a huge part of it, come to think of "boring as hell”.  I rarely get bored, but the few times I have – usually in the hospital while delirious with pain above a 9 on the pain scale – have been hellish.  So I bet hell is boring, boring, boring, if it exists.  Like off-the-charts boring.)

I’ve rarely met people who are really evil, but these people are.  They torment people for their own amusement.  They have made a lifelong habit of it, from everything I know about them.  That is evil.  And it is also boring.

Hurting people is boring.

Loving people is amazing.  Loving people means discovering new and amazing things in every part of the person you love.  Whether that is a friendship, a romance, a sexual relationship, a platonic partnership, or whatever kind of relationship – if love is truly involved, then it is anything but boring.  Because love shows you everything amazing about the world.  Love shows you everything amazing about people.  Love is hard, but love is good, and beautiful, and interesting.

Doubt me?  Read my poem:  The Mind Bridge: A True Story.  It’s about my first real friendship.  It’s about how love makes people infinitely interesting.  It’s about how love makes it so that two people from totally different worlds can build bridges and connect to each other.

How could bullying ever compare to making bridges between the totally different worlds in people’s minds?

How could it ever compare to getting to know someone.  Really getting to know them.  Someone so different from you.  And yet you can always find points of connection.  And you can look at the similarities.  And you can look at the differences.  And then you can see how beautiful the person is.

How can hurting someone on purpose ever, ever compare to that?

How can cruelty ever compare to love?

Cruelty is boring.  Evil is boring.  Bullies are boring.  And I see people, in stories, they always talk about how much more interesting the evil people are, they think being evil makes you more complex than being good.  But it doesn’t, not in real life.  Maybe people are written that way, but it’s not how people really are.  In real life, good people are complex and interesting and everything but boring and stupid.

You want interesting?  Try love.  Try compassion.  Try helping people because it’s the right thing to do, not just because it makes you feel good about yourself.  Try getting to know someone who is very different from yourself.  Try getting to know someone who is very similar to yourself.  

I’ve heard, often, that getting to know someone very similar to yourself must be boring, and also somewhat egotistical.  But it isn’t.  It’s just different than getting to know someone different than yourself.  Getting to know someone very similar to yourself means things like…

• You get to know someone who has the same taste in music, but different life experience, so their entire music collection is amazing stuff you’ve never heard and you can swap music and be entertained for weeks on end like this.
• You can skip a lot of the initial stages of getting to know someone.  Not all of them.  But there are many things you have so much in common that you instinctively know you don’t have to explore them too closely.  And then you can delve deeper into the relationship than you otherwise would be able to, because the first twenty layers or so were all instinctually familiar.
• And that means that you get to have conversations at levels of depth that you can’t reach with other people, just because with other people you have all these layers in the way that have to be explored before you could ever get that deep – if you ever could.
• You can communicate with each other on a level that would seem telepathic if you didn’t know that it came from your brains running in parallel.  You barely need words, you barely need gestures, those things are just like a carrier wave for communication on levels that you normally could not share with anyone.
• Often – but be cautious and get to know the person first no matter how similar to you they seem – you can tell this person things that you can tell nobody else in the world.  Because you know they won’t judge you, because you know they have the same thought patterns about this stuff.  So you don’t have to have secrets from everyone in the world anymore.
• You can help each other overcome flaws in yourselves that nobody else can even see, let alone help you with.  Often, one or the other will be better at certain flaws than others, so you each have things to teach each other about your biggest flaws and how to deal with them.
• It’s so much less exhausting to communicate with them because you rarely have to explain anything.  And when you do have to explain, the explanations are shorter and less convoluted.
• I’ve known my cognitive doppelganger since around 2007, I think.  We’ve never fought.  Not that we didn’t come close.  But because our instincts about each other have allowed us to sidestep fights we otherwise would have, so far.  I don’t doubt that one day we will fight, but so far this holds a record in friendships for me, not having fought with someone.  Not that fighting would ruin the friendship at all, and I’m sure we will fight one day, but it amazes me that we haven’t yet.
• My doppelganger and I are sort of a minority within a minority of cognitively disabled people, when it comes to cognitive and communication style.  We do not have the styles most commonly accepted in the autistic community, for instance.  Meeting someone this much like myself means being able to communicate in my native language, a language that for most of my life I thought that only I could speak.  I had a hunch there was at least another person out there who could speak it, and for many lonely years I hung onto that idea for dear life.  But until I met her, I didn’t know it could really be real, and I didn’t know how easy communication can be when you’re communicating with someone just like yourself.

And that’s just the beginning.  So love is not boring, period.  (By love I mean all forms of love, not just romantic.  I’m discussing friendships here, mostly.)  Love towards someone very different from you is not boring.  Love towards someone very similar to you is not boring.  Love is not boring.

Hate is boring.  Evil is boring.  Cruelty is boring.  Malice is boring.  Bullying is boring.

And that’s why I made the majority of this post about love. :-)

TL;DR:  Evil is boring, love is amazing.

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