I Don’t Want to Heal, I Want to Stay Interesting
I believe that every relationship is a learning lesson. Even when some relationships fail, there is always something gained from the connection and experience.
All of my life, I have always loved telling a good story. I love seeing people’s reactions when I share something absolutely outlandish as we all laugh about it together. Some might call me a chronic oversharer, but I think there is value in being an open book and letting people in on your life.
Swapping stories creates connection. As someone whose biggest treasure in life is my connections, it’s my favorite thing when I have a new story sitting on the back burner. At some point, you have to ask yourself whether “doing it for the plot” is truly worth the consequences.
Reflecting on my past relationships, I can confidently say I have learned a valuable lesson from every single one — no matter how long they lasted. Each person brought their own things to the table, negative or positive. Every relationship has shown me qualities I now know are important to me in a future relationship, whether they were characteristics I had known about before, or didn’t realize were important to me until I was experiencing them first-hand in a relationship. Dating helps narrow down your perfect person and your perfect fit, it is never a waste, even when that relationship didn’t work out. I think you also learn a lot about yourself when you choose to share your life with someone new.
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The biggest lesson I have learned while at college is how to remove myself from a relationship when it no longer suits me despite the pull to stay. One of the roadblocks I have run into is remaining in a relationship because of the crazy stories it gave me. Every week something new happened, and I would spend the next week talking about it until something new happened the following week. My friends would ask me about it all the time and we would laugh about it for days. It almost made these moments of vulnerability I was having myself less serious. Since I was able to reframe these stories in a way to make others laugh it meant that I could avoid the obvious reflection of true feelings that stared back at me in the mirror each day. It was almost like a fading echo. The first yell sounded clear and consistent with the story I wanted to tell, but with each fading echo, I saw the story I told in clear light. Slowly but surely, these stories that I would tell started to affect me in real time. I was spending so much of my time and energy thinking about another person. While chasing someone is exciting and thrilling, it is exhausting. Constantly playing a game of catch me if you can! But no matter how often I caught up to the chase, I would always be at the starting line, time and time again. Constantly enthralled with it, like playing tag as a little kid on the playground.
While I would laugh about these situations with any listening ear, they were actually negatively affecting me. I noticed a change in how often I would think about this person. I couldn’t escape them, but I also didn’t want to, not just yet. I wasn’t ready for the game to be over, for my stories to end. No one would know, though, right? It’s just a funny story. It’s just a man – who cares, I’m having fun! Do it for the plot!
Over and over, I would repeat these phrases to myself every time I allowed myself to process what was genuinely happening. I would snap out of this every once in a while, swearing to remove myself from the situation. But that only ever lasted a week or two before I found myself feeling bored, like I had nothing interesting to contribute to a conversation.
It became a never-ending cycle of going back to the same person and the same chaos over and over again. I was fueled by the fact that, in my head, I was boring without the intensity and toxicity.
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There was a constant push and pull to these situationships. It almost felt like I was on the edge of my carseat every weekend, not knowing where the wheel would take me. While waiting by the phone sounds desperate, it felt almost like a game, and I was the winner if I heard from them.
Waiting by the phone might seem to be a loss in itself, but I was the real winner if I was the one to answer the call. I felt like crossing the finish line at the end of a long race, even if the next morning meant starting from the start all over again.
Sometimes the card deck would shuffle, and I would find myself thinking it was all over; But it never was, even after a month of radio silence. When I finally got that notification on my phone, all I could think about was that I couldn’t wait to tell my friends every detail.
I romanticized my relationship with this person in my head because whenever I would explain the situation to someone, it would always lead to a funny conversation. At the end of the day, I’m just having fun, right?
Our generation has grown up watching toxic dynamics, even if we didn’t recognize them. I was obsessed with “Gossip Girl” in my preteen years and yearned for a relationship like Chuck and Blair’s. Now as an adult, I realize how controlling their relationship truly was. In my last years of high school, I loved watching Sex and the City. I always found myself thinking how fun it would be to have stories like Carrie Bradshaw’s, even though her relationship with Big was marked by emotional unavailability and manipulation.
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It is a normal human reaction to love a great story, to love drama and to sometimes even crave both. Yet, after being in a situation that gave such good stories to tell, I realized how self-destructive that craving for a good story can really be.
Here is what I know now: A relationship is never going to make you interesting.Basing your originality on another person will never last in the long run. While some people do stay in your life forever, it is rare. The longest relationship you will ever have is the one with yourself and by basing who you are on another person, will only ever leave you lost, tired and looking for a sense of direction. You are valuable as your own unique self. People should like listening to your stories because of your individuality, not because of the person that the story is about.
It took me a year to have this epiphany. To realize how my behavior was only ever harming myself and that staying in a situation “for the plot” is never going to work out. It is OK to care, and it is OK to have real feelings. It is what makes us all humans. Convincing yourself that you’re doing something just “for fun” is never going to change how you truly feel, even if you mask it from everyone else around you.
The most important thing we can do is learn how to find value in ourselves without having our worth tied to another person. I found that even after I decided to remove myself from the situation for good, my friends never found me boring. I even learned that being less interesting was just a concept in my own head.
At the end of the day, we have all been searching for someone to understand us. Most of us are just trying to find something to bridge the gaps between us. Stories are a common ground. Regardless of someone's upbringing, different beliefs or opinions, a good story can create companionship and connection, if only for a brief moment. In my own connections I have met some of my best friends by simply telling a story about my day, or explaining a funny memory from the past. That’s what makes it hard to know when to draw the line. But the good thing is some of the best stories are the ones that make us strive for better. The story about your situationship might make everyone laugh, but will never have as much impact as telling a story about something that is important to you and to others. But that’s the best thing about life, we get to make mistakes and grow from them everyday. And guess what, a lot of those mistakes make pretty great stories.
Strike out,
Writer: Savannah Rude
Editor: Hailey Indigo
Savannah Rude is an editorial writer for Strike Magazine GNV. When she is not figuring out her next story, she can be found practicing a new Yoga pose, staying way too invested in Scandal or drinking a cherry mocha latte at Coffee Culture. You can reach out to her by Instagram @savannahrude or by email at savannahrude@gmail.com
