Once again I’ve been confronted by people who appear to be looking for an answer, but just see what they want to see. It’s frustrating because you just want to tell them “Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!”. It’s like they walk into a store expecting to find nothing colored blue. The store’s name is “Everything Blue” and literally everything in there is blue, but they can’t see it and so wander around going, “Don’t they have anything in..you know…blue?” And you so you think, well maybe they are looking for a particular color blue, so you show them this one and that one, lighter, darker, greenish, yellowish, blackish, but nothing is right. And then finally it dawns on you, they just can’t see the blue no matter what you do. Either they are looking for something completely different and mistakenly calling it blue or they have an issue that is causing them to not see blue even though they are looking for it.
At this point in my life, I leave them in the store by themselves to figure it out and go do something that has nothing to do with blue. Because it isn’t blue’s fault and I shouldn’t have negative connotations associated with it. I don’t have problems with blue, thank you very much. Of course, it’s rarely as simple as that, but you get the point. Sometimes, although they seem to think they want or need something and they seem to put energy into that something, what they really want is to be validated in their perspective of things. To find that whatever they are looking for or wanting doesn’t exist. And you’d think they’d be satisfied once they have proven that. They would feel vindicated or do the “I told you so” dance and move on. But they don’t. They just keep wandering around looking for it like they are on a hunt for the last Dodo in the world or something.
Which, being an A-type personality who is a problem solver, makes me absolutely “bats**t”….ahem….crazy. I know it’s impossible to prove a negative but give it up at some point. Unless you want to mount an expedition to the interior of Africa or fly to the South Pole, you probably aren’t going to find what it is you’re looking for. But that’s the point. Putting energy into something that can’t be resolved, that doesn’t have any ending, that completely misses the point, allows the person to feel as if they are taking action and doing what is right, while not actually achieving anything and not being responsible for the outcome. If there is no blue in the universe they aren’t responsible for that. And if they are looking for blue they can avoid all the other things that are going on in their lives which are too frightening or large or important or frustrating or impossible to deal with and have to be suffered through…etc, etc. You get the point.
Personally, I prefer avoidance through ice cream, but to each their own. Just keep me away from the people going into the “Everything Blue” store. I think my head might explode.
