Walls

So I've realized that I'm really good at building walls around myself...

I do it to keep people at a certain distance. I think I believe I'm trying to protect them from letting me hurt them as I'm fairly certain I often do. The key drawback to this distance though, is after a while, people find something/someone more interesting to focus on, and they move on, and I end up realizing that I'm the one who's being hurt by abandonment. I was taking the attention/friendship for granted, and now its too late for me to pull it back in.

I do it with friends, I do it with potential romantic partners, I even do it with my family. Time and again, I warn people to stay away, don't let me hurt you, and yet with increasing frequency, I'm the one who ends up in pain when they ultimately take my advice.

When you have a crisis of confidence it becomes so easy to shun the outside world, tell everyone that you're not worthy of their time, of their emotion, of their attention. But once they grow tired of the negativity, or just find some new person or way to channel their desire to help, you end up as the one who actually finds out that it is a lonely existence, and suddenly you really wish all that attention was where they had tried to send it.