Dear Miranam,

I understand and relate to a lot of things that you wrote about. People struggle with social anxiety and situations like jobs and financial security for the possible reasons that their values are based around them and they are yet to attain some level of fulfillment in those areas. For them the internal dialogue would be something like – if I am confident in this aspect of my job I will be happy or if I have an x amount of money I will be happy.

A person who already has it or has their values based elsewhere is less likely to think of them as important. When you wrote about how your deep level of conversations and interactions feels for most people, I couldn’t help but smile when I thought of similar situations that I find myself at times. I have wondered several times whether other people also think to the same extent about life in the way I do. This kind of intensity makes me hesitant to talk to others and more often than not the “introvert” tag sticks.

I understand that you are possibly not introverted but I thought I will share how I have handled some of the conversations that I felt were not at the level that I wanted. One of the things that I realized was the level of curiosity that I had in others – sadly was nothing much to speak about. Working on it has helped. Since I am naturally curious about myself the shift was not very difficult.

How do you get that minimum attention and care, that feeling of being important and significant for someone?

I feel that there is very little that you can do to ensure that another person feels that way about you simply because I believe that it is out of our area of control. But one thing is sure that when we interact with another person with that cloud of expectations over our interactions, in some way we are bound to show our disappointment. So what I try and tell myself – No expectations = no disappointments.

This has helped give me a degree of freedom to the extent that my energies are focussed on me alone and paradoxically this  helped improve a lot of my interactions.

I absolutely get what you mean when you wrote about feeling phony about other sources of happiness. But it is not about filling a void. I think it is more about creating joy for its own sake not looking at replacing something. Maybe it would give the energy needed to fill the void?

With regards to examples – again reiterating that my life situation is different from yours – re defining the degree of expectations of love to make best use of what is currently available – is that an option?

Take care