It Gets Difficult to Let People in as We Grow Up

When I was a kid, I used to think that the more friends one has, the better their lives are. I don't think good lives are ever measured by the amount of relationships. Its always about the quality of the relationship. I realized that now.

I think that as kids, it is easier to invest time and energy into making friends and trying out new people to see if it works out for us. And by the time we're in our twenties, our nascent minds and raw emotions make it difficult to let go of people, and a the same time let people in. Letting people in means letting our guards down. But years of building the walls are not easy to forget. Its not easy to tear down these defenses and let someone in who might be carrying weapons of their own.


Funnily, we see their lives and their intimacy as a weapon. I don't know why its so easy to think from a hostile perspective. Maybe its the hurt that comes from having bad experiences.

I am at that point in life where I am learning that its not them, its me. And that if I have the ability to feel hurt, i also carry in me the potential to hurt. Its easy to forget that others are also letting their guards down to let us in. And if we go in with hostility, that's what we find. We get what we look for.

I have lost friends. I have made new friends. But just like anything, I have lost the innocence of childhood belief in people. It used to be so easy to trust the world. But sometimes empathy can take a toll on one's own understanding of the world. Too much empathy, too much loss of the self. Too much hostility, too much loss of the love that could have been.

I guess that it will take time to find the right kind of balance between out hurt, and our desire to love and be loved. It will take some time to let myself into other people's lives. It will take time for others to let me into theirs. All the while trying to clean up and make room after the ones who've already left.

We can't live alone. That's not how humans are meant to function. So we go on, we don't stop trying. We look back at the past not to find reasons to hurt, but to looks at how we felt when we were kids, when even touching a scorpion for the first time seemed like an act love, confusing it with the crabs we played with on the beach. We look at how we felt when we found new colors, new words, new feelings - we found all of this in new people. We look for the happiness that comes from letting people in. And that's how we go on...

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