Intensity

This is something I wrote this summer, before a lot of the current things have happened.  I use the word crazy in here, but I use it not to be offensive, but if you've ever met me... Well, I'm crazy.  You'll get the idea after read what I have to say.  It just kind of says some things I've been feeling lately and this was 2 months ago. 

I am a little crazy, I realize that.  I've lost friendships and relationships due to my craziness.  Sometimes I worry about slipping back into my old crazy patterns and driving even more people away.  I get a special kind of anxiety about this character flaw when I am reminded of relationships that I have in one way or another ruined.  This could occur by coming across an old photograph, or hearing the persons named mentioned by another friend.  This puts me on the defense, I check to see if my current actions are anything close to as crazy as the actions that may have ended the referenced friendship.

Maybe crazy isn't the word for it, I can be described more as intense.  One of the definitions Merriam-Webster gives for the word intense is: marked by or expressive of great zeal, energy, determination, or concentration.  That's about how I see it, I'm intense, and my intensity can express itself in many different ways.

When I first started reflecting on the word intense and subsequently intensity, I thought about a time when I was a kid and I burned myself very badly.  My sisters had a set of desk lamps that were accurately called high intensity desk lamps.  It used a bulb that was brighter than normal incandescent light bulb, and as one would expect much hotter than anything I had ever touched before.  I learned this a little too late.

One day I was playing on my older sisters bed, living in some make believe world with alligators under the bed, and dragons in the closet.  I discovered by putting the lamp that was on the side of my sisters bed under her bedspread, it made a bright pink glowing color.  Who knows as a four or five year old what I might have imagined it to be.  I enjoyed looking at it, and continued to play with the bedspread tented over the lamp glowing

Soon I began to smell something burning.  I looked and there was a brown spot forming on my sisters pink bedspread. Panicked I reached to grab the lamp by the metal part that covered the bulb, this is what caused my burn.  This was not the worst part for me however.  My mom had also smelled the burning, and by this time I was hiding in another room.  She first came to find me, and saw that I was burnt, then she wanted to know what had caused the smell.  I left her to figure it out, sobbing because I thought I was in more trouble than I ever had been.

I don't remember getting yelled at, however I'm sure I did get some kind of small lesson out of it.  What I do remember is my mom giving me a hug, telling me that she was just glad that I wasn't hurt worse than I could have been.  And she put something on the burn to make it feel better.  That was it, and I almost burned down the house!  If I can be forgiven for something like that, I'm sure I can be forgiven for much less.

This has not been the case for many friendships that I have lost over the years because of my intensity.  These relationships can fall into two categories.  The first is when the person never really got to know me well enough to begin with and was turned off by my general personality.  It is fairly harmless, it is hard for me to do wrong on my own.  If I have wronged a particular person, they most likely played a part as well, whether they realize it or not.

The second category are those people who might know me fairly well and let a small slip of judgement on my part affect their whole view on who I am.  If this is the case, did I really want to be friends with this person to begin with?

I'm not saying it's not my fault.  I have totally made poor judgement calls, or have had a lack of judgement all together.  I won't deny that sometimes I am just too intense, but who hasn't had these moments?

When people stop associating with me, do not return calls, e-mails, or letters, I take this to heart.  I am deeply wounded by it. Especially because most of the time, I am not the only person at fault.  I'm willing to forgive most people for most things, and some people are so shallow that they can not see me for who I really am.

I am a lover and I care deeply about other people, no matter what their role in my life has been.  It hurts to not have those gestures returned.  I constantly struggle to have good judgement, to not be too intense.  I suppose the truth is people just can't handle me.  I think this is someone else's problem, not mine.  But again, I can not stress enough how much it hurts to not be accepted including and in spite of my judgement and intensity.  Perhaps this is why God invented Moms.