Stress test

I forgot about this. (Or blocked it out.) How everything is elevated to a level of hyper-meaning. Who talks first. Talking on the phone or not. Calling back or not. Seeming interested, but not too eager.

But that’s not what’s really stressing me. (Nor is it unexpected.)

The issue is: I’ve come to realize over that I quite enjoy being validated... okay... I quite enjoy being lauded. (That’s a lot of why I was so nervous about started Graduate school.)

See, I’m more dependent on the opinions of others than I used to be. Often, more than I’d like to be.

This isn’t to say that I live my life through the eyes of others. I’m still a bit of a loner and, as a writer, most of my life is spent working in a figurative isolation. Also – at the risk of sounding arrogant – I have every confidence in my abilities and myself the majority of the time.

It’s more that the period of my life where I have no care or concept of what other people think is gone.

And now that I’m back into a part of life in which I have less confidence and where validation isn’t as easy to interpret or receive. (By virtue of how male-female relationships work –– particularly when we’ve agreed to moving slowly.)

The brilliantly bright side: this all helped me realize one of the things I really like about her. In the past, with other girls, I was able to receive easy validation. But it was either insincere or through an unconscious (maybe) manipulation on my part.

She isn’t that easily taken, which is an incredibly good thing.