When protectiveness becomes a problem… or why to be mature at 18 is not such a good thing...
I’ve been doing some thinking today about my way of treating my closest friends. And by closest I mean really close, those people who I would do almost anything for if they need me.
I realized that the more I care about someone, the more annoyingly protective and patronizing I become with him/her….
And this is not because I want to, but because I just care too much… Of course, considering my experience with my own mother and how her overprotectiveness makes my life miserable, I don’t find that quality of mine particularly good for me or for the ones I love… I don’t find it a quality at all… Acting not like a friend to someone my age, but like that someone’s mother/grandmother seems to drift people away from me and I can’t blame them at all. After all, when they communicate with someone who is 18 years old, like me, they expect from me to act like an 18-year-old, not like 40… ( Which reminds me, by the way, that I recently made a test about my mental age…. Guess what- it turned out to be 45-50…. I wish I can say that I was surprised, but I am not…. )
The thing is, I am proud of the fact that I am more mature than most of the people my age. That has helped me through a lot of difficult moments. But now I see the dark side of the picture- maturity comes with worrying about people, worrying brings annoyance to the people who cause it, annoyance gives birth to conflicts, conflicts create more worry and this circle ends friendships if not controlled. And I feel exactly that- like I cannot control that protectiveness/patronizing of mine…
If I am nasty, I can purposely hold back the bitchy words I want to say to someone, If I am gloomy, I can purposely talk about happy stuff and keep the gloominess as far as possible, but this is not about any of my moods. This is not a mood. It is the simple fact that I care. I can’t stop caring. If I stop caring, this means I have stopped loving the person in front of me.
So… this is something I haven’t encountered in my life before- to be unable to stop my patronizing just because I care and worry…
Most of the people I communicate with in real life are on my mental level or are indeed 40-50 years old so I don’t need to patronize them- they just don’t do things which make me worried because they act like/are adults… And now I realize I have to learn to communicate with people my age all over again…
I know the older people on my flist will probably laugh about that. I am perfectly aware of the fact that there are really more important issues than how to deal with worrying about friends, but still... this situation surprised me a little...
What a mess...