Why We Fight in Various Endearments

I was thinking about how we choose our friends more or less arbitrarily when we're little. Then something changes, and we look for friends who suit us (whether or not we find them is, of course, an entirely different jar of cookies). Then, at some point, we start looking for someone who's specially ours.

I think that there's a point where we fall out of love with ourselves. Up until then, we look for people to act as our accessories, platonically (Prosebox is telling me this isn't a word but it shows up in the OED), romantically, or in some other form. Our love for ourselves is self-sufficient and nearly perfect: unquestioning, forgiving, accepting, and certain. But then we start recognizing the nastier qualities we possess. We find ourselves incapable of completely willing away that one terrible thing or another we did or even thought. And then we fail where we were sure we should have succeeded in any of the realms of things we care about, from the banal to the possibly important: in romance, in academia, in friendship, in employment, in dreams, in those endeavors so terribly worthwhile to humans, like sports and arts and beer drinking. And we realize we're not the person we're in love with.

Once this happens - once we fall out of love with ourselves - we start looking for people to be more than accessories. We look for friends and loves who have something we wanted in ourselves. Not that we find the somethings. Maybe we do.

On a completely different note, I'm sad, and sad for reasons that sound, and maybe are, stupid. The temptation is to not list them because people can read this diary, but Etta is at my mom's house and I'm not going to make a private book for one entry. Hailey's friend's sister (in other words, some twenty-something who I really don't know) had her life support pulled today. Amanda, an alternately mean and nice girl from childhood, is panicking after deciding to change her major after four years. Audrey is still living with her mother and suffering for it. My mother's life is sad and emotionally desperate. University of Michigan didn't accept me. Khalil and David aren't talking at all. Austin didn't finish parts of the ACT and is upset with himself. Big and small things, and I'm feeling all of them for no good reason. Except the U of M thing. That makes sense. Other than that, I'm just letting myself feel sad over the unrelated and remote, puny movements of a few days. I'm not trying to get a handle on it because I think empathy should be cultivated, but the fact that the feelings don't belong to me makes me heavy, displaced, inappropriate, tired, invasive.