Curiosity Killed The Cat
Jun. 17th, 2011 08:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trickykittyLast night was a very long night. I stayed awake writing and thinking till much later than I expected, and then couldn't sleep with what rest of the night I had. Constant tossing and turning and 10min semi-disturbing deep sleep dreams followed by more wakefulness. I'm a bit sleep dep today.
I'm a horribly curious, nosey, and almost voyeuristic person. I've been this way my whole life. It's not something tied back to the defensive me or the ego me or the jealous me. It's just the real me, and it's idiosyncratic enough to cause problems for me. It's also why I'm so keen on learning new things, so it has it's benefits as well, but I'm not here to talk about the benefits of it.
All my life I have been sneaky and nosey. Always wanting to be a fly on the wall. Always wanting to hear a conversation. Always wanting to see what was going on. Always wanting to know what someone's life is like behind those closed doors. That's where I learned to have such an active imagination. If I didn't know for sure, if I wasn't told or wasn't privy, I was still curious, and I filled the gap with my own imaginations. It isn't that I want to know the truth of things; I would just prefer to know the real over having my imaginations take hold and then mis-flavoring my reality. Trying to get them to not take over is a challenge for me. If that curiosity bug is sparked, and it's sparked quite often, there's just no easy way to get it to turn off. It's like trying to get an ADD child to sit still and focus. Good luck with that. My curiosity ties in with my OCD, so if it's strong enough it takes the form of an obsession that I just can't easily shake until the compulsive acts (in this case, knowledge gathering) are satisfied. That's not to say that I CAN'T shake the urge, but that it's pretty damned difficult.
I know most people don't care to know so much about what's going on in other people's lives and can accept when it's none of their business. They don't have the curiosity bug biting at their heels. They can leave it up to the universe, or that other person, to solve and understand, and they so easily move on to the next thing in their own life without a moment's thought. Some people go so far as to be the complete opposite of me: They don't want to know, don't tell them, don't involve them, they don't want to hear, stop bugging them, go away. I have a hard time with that. I have a hard time with being told I can't know what's going on, or don't go over there because they're having a private conversation. I'm meddling without realizing it. From my perspective I'm just being curious, but the reality is that I'm being intrusive and sometimes hurtful bringing up things or talking about things that are otherwise none of my business. That's where this behaviour causes me problems.
Strangely enough, my own level of private, intimate moments is the one thing I've always wanted. I have always wanted a life of my own, behind closed doors, shared with only a select other. I'm actually a very private person. I have always been more comfortable with a boyfriend than without, because then I knew there was someone there with whom I could share my inner thoughts and trust that those thoughts were not going to be shared with any others. When the boyfriends were gone, that closeness, intimacy, and shared experience went away with them. My life returned to feeling transparent again, and I dislike this greatly.
If I want a close friend/boyfriend/husband so badly it's not for the house and the kids and the stability. It's for the intimacy. It's for the close connectedness, both on a mental and a physical level. I can be alone and share my thoughts with my notebooks, visit certain friends-with-benefits, and all that other stuff that would allow me to be content in my singleness, but it's just not the same. It's cake without icing. Still good and tasty, but lacking in something I crave. It's not something I need to live, but it's something that I would really like to have. It is my preference.
I also know that whenever I have had a boyfriend, my urge to be sneaky and curious was always limited to him alone. I sort of naturally stopped being nosey about others outside of the relationship. I have always believed in transparency within a relationship, and I know that as long as I felt there was true honesty and openness, I didn't have any urges toward relationship-based curiosity at all. It was only when I felt something was being kept from me that it would rear it's head, and then I would tend towards being sneaky and investigative over asking directly. I think that might have been because I felt a level of distrust, and I was always scared of direct confrontation. (It's only recently that I've been growing the balls needed to approach someone about something directly. I'm still working to make it more the norm, but it's getting there.)
I don't think of being honest and open as being clingy. For some they are one in the same, but I think that's just an unwillingness to share aspects that, given a certain level of relationship, should be shared. To me, it's just the natural commitment you give as your relationship grows stronger. I have always been able to feel when my previous relationships were weakening simply because that commitment was being broken. It usually wasn't that I didn't on some level already know, I just wanted confirmation and so I sought it out through indirect versus the more proper direct means. Yeah, this paragraph has some specific history imbedded in it that I'm not wishing to share here.
Mostly, this is just a realization and specification of what has always been a part of me. I know it's something that will never disappear completely. I know it has it's benefits and it's pitfalls. I know that some aspects of it require more vigilance on my part, and better choices on how to live with it in the future. Just like my OCD, it's just a part of me that I have to learn to live with correctly from day to day.
I'm a horribly curious, nosey, and almost voyeuristic person. I've been this way my whole life. It's not something tied back to the defensive me or the ego me or the jealous me. It's just the real me, and it's idiosyncratic enough to cause problems for me. It's also why I'm so keen on learning new things, so it has it's benefits as well, but I'm not here to talk about the benefits of it.
All my life I have been sneaky and nosey. Always wanting to be a fly on the wall. Always wanting to hear a conversation. Always wanting to see what was going on. Always wanting to know what someone's life is like behind those closed doors. That's where I learned to have such an active imagination. If I didn't know for sure, if I wasn't told or wasn't privy, I was still curious, and I filled the gap with my own imaginations. It isn't that I want to know the truth of things; I would just prefer to know the real over having my imaginations take hold and then mis-flavoring my reality. Trying to get them to not take over is a challenge for me. If that curiosity bug is sparked, and it's sparked quite often, there's just no easy way to get it to turn off. It's like trying to get an ADD child to sit still and focus. Good luck with that. My curiosity ties in with my OCD, so if it's strong enough it takes the form of an obsession that I just can't easily shake until the compulsive acts (in this case, knowledge gathering) are satisfied. That's not to say that I CAN'T shake the urge, but that it's pretty damned difficult.
I know most people don't care to know so much about what's going on in other people's lives and can accept when it's none of their business. They don't have the curiosity bug biting at their heels. They can leave it up to the universe, or that other person, to solve and understand, and they so easily move on to the next thing in their own life without a moment's thought. Some people go so far as to be the complete opposite of me: They don't want to know, don't tell them, don't involve them, they don't want to hear, stop bugging them, go away. I have a hard time with that. I have a hard time with being told I can't know what's going on, or don't go over there because they're having a private conversation. I'm meddling without realizing it. From my perspective I'm just being curious, but the reality is that I'm being intrusive and sometimes hurtful bringing up things or talking about things that are otherwise none of my business. That's where this behaviour causes me problems.
Strangely enough, my own level of private, intimate moments is the one thing I've always wanted. I have always wanted a life of my own, behind closed doors, shared with only a select other. I'm actually a very private person. I have always been more comfortable with a boyfriend than without, because then I knew there was someone there with whom I could share my inner thoughts and trust that those thoughts were not going to be shared with any others. When the boyfriends were gone, that closeness, intimacy, and shared experience went away with them. My life returned to feeling transparent again, and I dislike this greatly.
If I want a close friend/boyfriend/husband so badly it's not for the house and the kids and the stability. It's for the intimacy. It's for the close connectedness, both on a mental and a physical level. I can be alone and share my thoughts with my notebooks, visit certain friends-with-benefits, and all that other stuff that would allow me to be content in my singleness, but it's just not the same. It's cake without icing. Still good and tasty, but lacking in something I crave. It's not something I need to live, but it's something that I would really like to have. It is my preference.
I also know that whenever I have had a boyfriend, my urge to be sneaky and curious was always limited to him alone. I sort of naturally stopped being nosey about others outside of the relationship. I have always believed in transparency within a relationship, and I know that as long as I felt there was true honesty and openness, I didn't have any urges toward relationship-based curiosity at all. It was only when I felt something was being kept from me that it would rear it's head, and then I would tend towards being sneaky and investigative over asking directly. I think that might have been because I felt a level of distrust, and I was always scared of direct confrontation. (It's only recently that I've been growing the balls needed to approach someone about something directly. I'm still working to make it more the norm, but it's getting there.)
I don't think of being honest and open as being clingy. For some they are one in the same, but I think that's just an unwillingness to share aspects that, given a certain level of relationship, should be shared. To me, it's just the natural commitment you give as your relationship grows stronger. I have always been able to feel when my previous relationships were weakening simply because that commitment was being broken. It usually wasn't that I didn't on some level already know, I just wanted confirmation and so I sought it out through indirect versus the more proper direct means. Yeah, this paragraph has some specific history imbedded in it that I'm not wishing to share here.
Mostly, this is just a realization and specification of what has always been a part of me. I know it's something that will never disappear completely. I know it has it's benefits and it's pitfalls. I know that some aspects of it require more vigilance on my part, and better choices on how to live with it in the future. Just like my OCD, it's just a part of me that I have to learn to live with correctly from day to day.
