I have no constructive advice for the form for the pursuit to take, as I was equally horrific at it. I’ll only say that, well, most of you have a decent idea of how weird and intense of a person I am, and there was someone out there who liked me enough, for some reason. So, nobody can be without hope
It’s a horrible cliche to say stupid shit like “b urself :]” but idfk. I’ve never known how to not be myself, and I’ve always thought I was a pretty neat guy so I don’t regret hardly any of it, but I can understand for anyone who struggles with self perception how that would feel like the most terrifying advice of all. I think I can also see how it makes interacting with people (and doubly so for people you may want to hug and kiss) feel like it has far higher stakes and with far greater risks. Putting yourSelf out there means you’re displaying your vulnerabilities, your passions, your beliefs, your fears, your so ons, and when things aren’t reciprocated it can feel all the more painful, because those feelings are connected to your emotional nerve endings so to speak.
However, unfortunately, I think I do need to reiterate that cliche and say that being yourself is the most important aspect of finding someone to form an intimate relationship with. I mean, for one, you don’t want someone else to fall for a persona, since you won’t be able to maintain that forever. But, I think what I took away when I was becoming confident in myself was that it was actually a good thing if being myself deterred some people from wanting to get to know me more. If you’re going to form an intimate relationship with someone, you being yourself is what should draw them in and endear yourself to them. Again, it seemed to work for someone as intense and weird as I am.
And so as a special note to anyone who might struggle with self perception and being too hard on yourself, a way to maybe rephrase the idea that being yourself and deterring some people not being a bad thing, I would say, do try your best to remember that how you feel about yourself is not necessarily going to be or have anything to do with how other people feel about you. In fact, you might be the worst judge of how people feel about you in the world, the more you struggle with self esteem the more objectively worse you probably are at it. Funny contradiction, isn’t it? People with low self esteem feel they’re the worst but they’re also the best at knowing why they’re the worst.
Brandon also brought this up, but, yeah, unlike the other cliche that I came at while beating around the bush of, I actually despise the cliche of “you can’t be in a healthy relationship if you don’t love yourself.” It’s ideal, but I do reject the idea it is some kind of mandatory sequence that must be done and any relationship is doomed if one initiates it without finding oneself and living laughing and loving or whatever. There is too much trauma and grief and misery in this world to expect everyone, or anyone, to be also dealing with all of that on top of loneliness when maybe initiating an intimate relationship. Although, what is a firm requirement is at least accepting that an ongoing deficit of self love can and will slowly poison any relationship, and that maybe the belief that it is mandatory is that many people also use entering into a relationship as an excuse to not prioritize learning to accept and love oneself. But I do think it’s perfectly acceptable to learn to love yourself while also building an intimate relationship. Well, maybe the only catch there is that it’s probably not going to go well if you’re not sharing that with the person you’re in an intimate relationship with, and then on top of that, you’re also not thinking that dumping the responsibility of figuring you out is going to work out either.. Oh well. I’m going off on a tangent.