I heard this interesting concept recently. “Are you addicted to relationships?” At first, I didn’t think that I was, but as the person speaking continued, I had come to the realization that I had definitely prioritized the relationships in my life over myself and my own personal growth.
Let me start off by saying that I don’t have a lot of close friends. I do meet a lot of people, I do have quite a lot of acquaintances; but in terms of close people, there aren’t many. To be honest with you, I don’t like people. I prefer to show kindness, but keep people at a distance. From that, you can see how I’d thought I didn’t have an addictions to relationships. That is because the addiction manifested itself in different ways. It wasn’t the usual relationships of ‘dating’ or hanging out with a ton of people on the weekend; it wasn’t me spending time with my family every second of the day. For me, it is the amount of people I was meeting, it is the ideas of future marriage, it is the daydreams of how it’s going to be when I have my own family.
I don’t think people realize how much time is wasted on daydreaming or how much energy goes into changing yourself for another person. One day, I looked at myself and I realized that I had been fantasizing about an old crush I had grown up with. I have been seeing myself through society’s eyes and started making changes to myself thinking he’d like me better if I looked or acted like the people on SNS. I wanted to reach out and see how he was. I wanted to interrupt his life and be the person I thought he would want me to be. Its straight bullshit. I’m embarrassed for even thinking that. I’m too damn old. I should be past this part in my life, shouldn’t I? I know for a fact that I shouldn’t be in a relationship at the moment and work on myself, but it serves as a wonderful distraction from working on myself.
Recently, this has been my issue. I have been prioritizing my relationships as to not grow into the person I can be. I have been calling friends, making up issues over small things, daydreaming about my old, old crush who I haven’t seen or heard from in years. It’s ugly. Granted, it’s hard to see the masking when you have been doing it for so long. But, BOY, when it is in your face, you can’t un-see it. Its funny. When I realized this, I wanted to call up a friend to talk about it. It was hard stopping myself from talking about this type of thing, but I’ll tell them when it comes up in conversations later on down the road… if I remember.
Look, I’m not telling you to hold back on developing relationships. We are human and we need relationships to grow and understand how the world works. What I am saying is to look at yourself and see if you have been using relationships as a distraction. It’s all fun and games until you are in your 80s looking back on how you didn’t protect yourself and regretting developing your God given gifts.
Be blessed in the best of ways.
Verse: Luke: 11:34
Song: Brighter by DOE
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Cu_IFuCC9A