In the midst of everything that I'm juggling (which had more piled onto it) I had a day of a ton of running around recently. Picking up things for my mother demanding my time, as well as some grocery store stops to get stocked back up on many things. While out, we decided to get lunch, which had a silly moment where I thought I wouldn't get what I'd ordered, then wound up getting it with extras.
On the way from lunch to the next store however, I had something click in my head. Something that finally made sense after contributing to the anxiety I've been dealing with for the last month. I don't have feels for Puppy. I want to keep him around as a friend, but there's more pressure from many angles that I should have feels for him that made me so anxious. He's not so gently pushing for me to say we have a serious relationship, and other people are waiting for me to say there's something official. Not to mention that I don't think he's in a state where I could tell him that I don't have any sort of attachment to him in the same way.
There's too many things in the grand scheme that just keep knocking any NRE that existed out the window. He lacks the broad spectrum of interests that allow me to keep up casual conversation with him on a myriad of topics, and I often feel like he's getting lost when I do start discussing something. This happens online, and in person, which makes things difficult. There's been some consent issues that while not dangerous in any way, resulted in me having near a trigger response at one point, and just showed me that he will only listen in a way that keeps me around, not because he cares about consent.
But most importantly, there's a lack of openness. One evening, I sent him a link to a video featuring someone beating part of one of my favorite game series blindfolded. I love the game, enjoy speedrunning, and appreciate people trying to do things in such difficult and obscure ways. Watching it brought me joy. And when I sent it to him, he just asked why anyone would bother with it, because it was a "retarded waste of time". It was only when I likened it to why people would decide to put arbitrary rules on pokemon to play nuzlockes and make them more difficult that he seemed less offput by it.
This bothered me. A lot. Not that I shouldn't like the video, but that he would hate on anything I enjoyed if it wasn't mutual. I tried writing it off, but it bugged me for so long. Long enough that it happened a second time, when I referenced music in cooking video, and he said that it belonged in a documentary on paper. As soon as I mentioned that I would watch that, and had in fact taken a class on the history of paper production, he got quiet, and killed the conversation.
I don't think he knows what to do with someone who enjoys learning. Likewise, his being closed off to finding enjoyment in things that aren't in his small scope of vision isn't something that I can compromise on. I need people in my life who are voracious. That want to learn and grow and do and experience. And what he's shown me, time and time again, is someone who is happy to stagnate. While I would love to go into things with an open mind with him, I also know that it's not fair to either of us for me to go into things with the expectation of potential, because potential is bullshit when it comes to people. It's not my job to change him, and I can't want him to be anything other than who he is today, right now, whoever that person may be.
It's been difficult even processing all of this, but necessary, and I'll figure out what to do with it.
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