Feeling: pensive
Listening to: Nine Days - "Bitter"
Reading/Watching: Sword Maker

Ampersand Project: "This place is not my place, these ways are not my ways."

I think sometimes I spend too much time wanting other people to understand me without putting any effort into understanding them. I will know things about a person cerebrally, like a dossier, or the exposition of a book. I will know it, but I don't feel it. And part of me does not accept it, especially that which is alien to my own personality. I vocally acknowledge it, but some hidden corner of me is still insisting that no, that can't be right; why would anyone do it that way?

Why would anyone keep a truth hidden, and run the risk of someone getting the wrong impression? There is such a danger, in letting a potential ally become an enemy through simple misunderstanding.

But perhaps any ally that is lost so easily was never an asset to begin with.

Why bear anguish in silence, in solitude? Why stand alone in your corner, and think it is better to compound grief with loneliness?

Then again, why invite false pity and empty words of comfort when they can do nothing? And perhaps it is not that you don't want comfort. Perhaps it is just that you don't want comfort from me, since I'm powerless in this matter, since I go about things wrong, since my arms are not the arms you want. I have been there, I have repulsed the offer of empathy because it comes from the wrong source, and perhaps I am the wrong source. I will have to accept that.

Accept, not just acknowledge, not recite like a sycophant, to pretend I understand until I think I am in a position to change your mind.

It's a shortcoming I need to work on. I apologize to people I have wilfully misread in the past. Your place is not my place, your ways are not my ways. Your thoughts are incomprehensible to me, but that does not make them wrong. And if I love you, I must love all of you.

And I do love you. Whether you want me to, or not.

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