Let it all out honey

So I know I've been away a while. Again. I imagine that you'll be able to follow the frequency of this blog by measuring when people are usually on vacation. I am in grad school you know. I have like, a life and stuff. But despite that life and stuff, I was so dumbfounded as to what the expression of the following letter writer's face was as they penned the following, I couldn't resist posting immediately.


Dear Victoria Blunt,

There is a child in me that is so incredibly sad, so incredibly lonely, that feels so alone and can't understand why people won't come touch me, come acknowledge me, won't simply look at me and smile and say "that's goodness right there; I like that", why I can't have the same sort of response that a flower might get, or a painting, or a sunset, or the stars at night; anything that people look at just to look at and see wonder and beauty and mystery. So my persona tries to find pieces of those things, and tries to paint me with them; I go around collecting stories about new fascinating breakthroughs in science, beautiful myths, funny stories, anything that will get someone's attention and make them say "wow, I like that, that's goodness right there", and I try to wrap myself up in all these fragments of that and get people to notice them, I freaking jam them down people's throats sometimes, screaming please fu! cking notice this, so that at least someone said "wow, I like that, that's goodness right there" while looking in my general direction, even if they didn't see what I actually wanted them too. And all the painting and self-wrapping just ends up making sure that nobody will ever actually see what I want them to see. I used to drive around singing along with my favorite music, at the top of my lungs, and wish that someone could be there to see it, wish that somehow someone could watch me in that moment, not because I'm a great singer, just because I was feeling bliss, because I was freely flowing out, and I knew that to the right person, to someone out there, that would be beautiful, they would understand what that meant, they would know what they were seeing, and they would say it was goodness, right there. And I dreamed it would be a woman who would see it, and she would see me, and she would find me captivating, she would watch me breathless, she would watch me and smile, and she wouldn't want me to do anything else but what I was doing, she wouldn't want me to come up with something clever or witty to say. And I go around trying to give that to the people around me, I see people who are hurting and I slip out of all of my persona and I open to them immediately and I say to them that they are goodness and that I like what I see, and I mean it, I mean it just because they are hurting, and I think that if I do that enough someone else will do it for me, and maybe they would, if they knew. How do I fix this?

Sincerely,

Huck Hurting

Dear Huck,

Assuming that this question lacks irony for a second (which I say mostly at your request to be looked at like a flower), I am going to try to translate what it is you're saying into a more easy to answer question.(For the sake of relatability and all that.) So it sounds like you know you have a lot of qualities, you try to get people to notice them by being a good listener, you feel lonely ,and you try to be interesting but then yr still lonely.

Okay. Laboring under that assumption, I will suggest the following: while, sure, it's always fun to be around someone who knows stuff about science and has a decent array of comic material handy, most people are impressed by confidence more than anything else. This is what yr lacking Hucky. Try thinking more about your own opinions, and voice those instead of what you hear on NPR every morning. Instead of trying so hard to amuse people, demand to be amused. In general, be more demanding of your needs from yr friends, but only if you can really believe that you deserve whatever it is that you want. And if you don't have a whole lot of friends, get into therapy and figure out how to meet some. Do more for yourself so that you can start believing yr good: write a screenplay or start a band or get you PhD or start a charity to save South Asian elephants or send a short story to the New Yorker like that kid in Gossip Girl did. As soon as you start thinking yr awesome, other people will too.

And finally (if you were being ironic), I found you amusing (In a good way!)

If you try too hard with people, they can smell desperation a mile away - and they won't want to breathe in that awkwardness for too long. On the other hand, if you expect everyone to come to you, yr forgetting that we all have own own issues and loneliness and insecurities to contend with. And so: you forget about everyone else, start figuring out what you have to do to actually like yourself, and take it from there my friend.

Good luck!