One of the most important parts of life is connecting with other people. The world can be a very dark and lonely place if you force yourself to pass through it on your lonesome. For something as necessary to the achievement of happiness, forming a bond with someone other than yourself can be surprisingly elusive.
Connecting with someone on a meaningful level proves to be difficult time and time again, not because we are all so incompatible — but rather because we choose to keep up our façade instead of allowing our true selves into the world.
Life can be brutal. Going into our everyday battles without a coat of armor to shield ourselves from cruel eyes and the judgments of others can be detrimental to our self-image. For this very reason, we feel that we cannot be ourselves, that being ourselves will only lead us into being shunned for being different — for being weird or eccentric.
This is the double-edged sword that we are all forced to wield: we all want to bond with our fellow brethren, but at the same time refuse to attempt doing so for the fear of rejection. So instead of facing the risk of being bruised and battered, we pile on as much chain-mail as we possibly can in order to avoid risking vulnerability.
The most common armor worn by the masses is aggression and ridicule. It's no secret that the best defense is a brutal offense — and so the asshole and bitch are born. Assholes are assholes because they choose to be. The only reason anyone would choose to act a certain way is if they believed that they would be better off doing so — or they're morons that aren't capable of forming the mental connection between cause and effect.
A smart asshole is only an asshole because he believes that life will be better to him if he were to fit that mold. In the same way, a smart bitch is a bitch because she believes that others will treat her better for it — respect her. A dumb bitch, on the other hand, is…well, just a dumb bitch.
If you take a close enough look at your fellow human beings, you'll notice that each and every single one us — no exceptions — is just as twisted and messed up as the rest; we are all damaged goods. If you think that you are better than anyone else, then you are mistaken.
You may be smarter, or wiser, or funnier, or prettier or more hung than the next guy, but you aren't better — not by a long shot. When it comes to what counts most, we were all given equal amounts of it, whatever 'it' is. There is something about being human that puts us all on an equal playing field.
No person is innately better than the next. Only a person's actions can be better than the actions of another's, but no one person is born better than anyone else. When you come to accept this fact, you will see the world in an entirely different light.
So how do we get around all of this swordplay? Unfortunately, the only way of bonding with anyone else is by taking the first step and sheathing your blade.
You'll need to take a leap of faith and hope that the person you're jumping towards will have the decency to thrust out his or her arms and catch you. It may very well be a suicide mission, but trying is better than losing hope. As long as you pick whom you trust carefully, you'll run a minimal risk of getting hurt.
Life is about taking chances and risking your comfort in order to create a better life. If you don't connect with someone, you'll find that you have wasted your life. If you don't drop your guard and hope that you don't get shot unarmed, then what is there for you to hope for? Take down that house of cards you surrounded yourself with; you can't live from inside it.
Paul Hudson | Elite.
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