Unskippable Ads
I’ve been witnessing premature vulnerability on display in conversations a lot lately. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely want to know why you can’t look your dad in the eye but how about you tell me about the lego set he snuck under your bed on your 8th birthday first?
Because you see, to understand what shaped you, I need to know you.
You are your deep-rooted fear of intimacy, but aren’t you also the spoons of sugar you add to your coffee, the order in which you arrange the cushions and the way you’ve always sliced your sandwiches?
A couple of years ago, I would’ve blocked attempts at small talk rather deftly. But whenever I pierce through the layers too quickly, bits and pieces of thread remain torn unevenly. I have to go back and sew them up at some point right?
My past self argues that the concept of linearity doesn’t apply to relationships, which I can’t deny. So I’m left questioning the intent.
Why am I being vulnerable? Is it to catalyze the relationship? Is it to elicit sympathy? Am I doing a recce of the other person’s emotional depth to save future-me some embarrassment?
We know everyone has the capacity for emotional vulnerability but the uncertainty of the extent makes us squint into the darkness to gauge the depth.
We carefully divide people using a scalpel and our heavily distorted & self-proclaimed capacity for depth as the base for comparison.
It’s a dichotomy as we pull out the same mask to hide both:
- Our pompousness with the ones whose pitstop is visibly above ours.
- Our fear of sounding terribly vain to the other half.
I feel emotional depth needs to be inched towards and explored together because if there is nothing underneath to support those conversations, where do you rest all the load after the deed is done?
There’s a reason it’s called baggage. You can’t carry it forever, can you?
You rest the load on the number of alarms I snooze before I finally wake up and the reason I hate the shade of paper ‘the economic times’ uses. And me? I rest it on knowing that you think white is criminally overrated and you prefer sleeping with a night light on.
Of course, there is a story to it. You ripped your wardrobe off white after your ex-boyfriend wore white the last time you saw him and fixating on the yellow night light distracted you from the screams from your parents’ bedroom.
But hang on — can we slow things down for now? Can we dress and undress layers in a way that feels slightly more gradual? Can we not rush?
We need some ads in our life we can’t skip, right?
