Expect the Expectations.

I got an ADHD diagnosis within the last couple of months and subsequently began treatment for it. I’m uncertain how much of the positive outcomes of my life recently can be attributed to the treatment of my ADHD, however I’d be inclined to attribute quite a bit of credit to the treatment for the upward trajectory of my life. Regardless, I feel as though I have unlocked an ability that I didn’t have before, the ability to zone in and hit a target. Whether or not this is a byproduct of the treatment or some other manifestation, this new found ability is broadening the capacity of my mind in ways that I particularly enjoy.

I feel as though I am able to engage with my thoughts more effectively. Introspection is something that I think I have naturally been inclined to do, but now I feel like I am capable of holding onto a particular thought or idea for quite a bit longer. Long enough to break it down to its source and truly understand the innerworkings of my mind. It has allowed me to locate something about myself that I didn’t truly realize was there. A cold barrier my mind has created to protect me exists, which is also going to eventually cause an immense amount of pain if I don’t address it at some point.

Abba da labba dabba babbadee bobbde la ba dee

For as long as I can remember I have been very observant. I am a student at heart and am constantly keeping a lookout for lessons that present themselves. Fortunately for me, not so fortunate for others, most of my lessons have been learned through observing the pain of others. There’s a saying, “2 heads are better than one". This is true in large part because, the more people that exist, the more chance an individual has to see others make mistakes and learn from them. It’s kind of like playing a video game. You have lives that allow you to respawn, the more lives you have, the more opportunities you have to learn and try again. I apply the same concept to the real world, but instead of being a guinea pig and hoping I reach the next platform, I listen.

There have been billions of human beings on this planet, billions of attempts, billions of failures, billions of triumphs. Use that shit to your advantage, you don’t need to figure everything out. You will probably need to figure a lot of stuff out for yourself, but we don’t live in a vacuum. If you stop and look around, you can see that every problem you have or some form of it, has been had billions of times over. Some people have failed miserably in your shoes, but there are also people who have pushed forward. Decide who you want to learn from. (or don’t, i guess)

The reason I bring up the idea of observing the world around you, is because it is exactly how I figured out an aspect of myself that I hadn’t thought of before.

There was a conversation I was having with quite a few different people in my life about romantic relationships. However, there was something buried within these conversations they would all say that my mind was having a hard time engaging with. When I would talk to the women in my life about the way men were acting or when I would talk to the men in my life about how they would act in response to relationships ending, there was this reaction to the act of breaking-up that I couldn’t relate to. The men in these interactions would have extremely strong emotional responses to being broken up with. Or they would have a very dire outlook on life if they were not in a romantic relationship as though there wouldn’t be a point to living if the checkbox of having a woman to love was a crucial aspect of being happy.

Upon hearing these stories, I was observing that I didn’t feel the same. I couldn’t relate to the pain these men were expressing. And I didn’t know why.

How do You determine your value?

I have come to love the feeling of not understanding why I feel a particular way about something, because it means that my mind is trying to dictate to me how I should feel about some type of external force. Whether I agree with my mind’s inclination or not is going to now be up to me to find out. This is what introspection is for, disallowing your mind from going on autopilot, but I’ll talk about this another day. (yea it’s a cliffhanger loser)

To remain focused, I don’t relate to other men, or people, in one particular aspect of dating dynamics. People tend to measure their value with external metrics. Money, career, partners, goals, social validation, etc. These are metrics outside of one’s self that people tend to use in order to affirm their value to the world. Specifically this is something that I noticed being done within romantic relationships.

In relationships there is an opportunity to allow your partner to be the external metric that determines your value. So while you are in the relationship, you have value because of the validation of this beautiful human being that gives you that value. This beautiful human is saying “holy shit I like you a lot, I would like to hang out with you and show you love and affection.” But unfortunately a person with low perception of their own self-worth translates that into “You are valuable now, because I am here telling you and other people that you have value.”

When you see this dynamic through this kind of a lens, I think it makes it extremely obvious as to how people can feel extremely torn and broken in response to the end of a relationship. This beautiful human that you allowed the power to determine your value, has decided to leave. Which means that you no longer have any value. To no fault of this beautiful human, they have unknowingly torn you apart and tossed you to the side. Instead of hearing “I feel like we aren’t a good fit anymore.” You hear “I am leaving you and I am taking all of your value away with me.”

If this is the way a man or any person is engaging with romantic relationships I can understand the intense shock that reverberates through ones body at the end of a relationship. This person that you allowed to fill you up with your worth through validation, is leaving you. How could you not logically come to the conclusion that you are worthless and will never love again. Is it accurate? I don’t think so, but it follows logically.

Observing what You are not

The concept of tying my self-worth to the validation of women or even other people in general is a foreign idea. It was this thought that caused a stir in my mind whenever it was brought up in these conversations about relationships that was hard for me to grasp. It was this observation that deepened not only my understanding of that experience but also deepened my understanding of myself.

Observing what something is not, seems to be a fairly useful way of defining what something is. If you can determine what something isn’t, you can more easily define what something is. This is the exact process that I utilized to understand why I didn’t relate to my peers.

I don’t exactly know why I don’t think I’ll run into the same problem, aside from the fact that I think I have adapted to not expecting much from the people I love. I am extremely independent to the point that the idea of somebody else determining my value is imperceivable to be quite honest. I’m not sure if it’s delusion or not, but I’ve managed to hold a high perception of myself for a very long time. This high self perception is probably the main reason I managed to become a fairly mentally stable person.

This isn’t me writing all of this to say that “validation is bad.” We like validation for a reason, it feels good to be validated by others. Whether or not beautiful people express their interest, praise for some type of work you’ve done, appreciation, all of these forms of validation feel extremely good to receive. But the issue arises when you determine your value based on whether or not you receive that validation. And that is just something that I have either not needed or have learned to not need. There is a meaningful difference between those two and I’m fairly certain I have engaged with the latter.

I do not like the idea that validation has any effect on a human beings worth, because it removes so much power from you to be happy. And it implies that some human beings don’t have any worth, which I’m somewhat inclined to disagree.

Am i a superhero?

So now what? Did I just find out that I have a superpower and I’m better than the people who externalize the measurement of their value? (yes lol)

One skill that I think that sometimes gets overlooked is the ability to extract the good from something and leave the bad. There are a lot of good attributes that I have developed by not relating to my peers in the way they engage in relationships. I am extremely confident in myself, independent, able to take rejection lightly, and I have a massive lack of entitlement to objects, people and outcomes. But I can also be seen as dismissive, cold, and numb to people that I care about deeply. The way that I would originally condense this concept was in a phrase

“I don’t need you, but I want you.”

This isn’t something I ever said to anybody, because it is intensely mean regardless of how positive I intended it. But it was true, this was my understanding of myself in respect to relationships.

It was harsh but it accurately surmised my perception. This deep independence within me, born out from my childhood, that I developed because of not receiving the help that I needed from the people that I loved. It was hard to depend on others, so I depended on the only person that I knew wasn’t capable of letting me down, me.

Not that the parental figures in my life didn’t want to support me, but for a long time I felt as though I was an afterthought. That feeling ate away at me for a long time and became self fulfilling because it led me to never ask for help. How could anybody help someone who never cries out for it? This furthered this deep independence, which also may have simultaneously boosted my self-esteem because I was succeeding in spite of the lack of support that I wasn’t asking for, but probably could have used.

So instead of being a little demon and telling my family “Hey just so you know I love you guys but I don’t need you whatsoever to have a happy life, JUST SO YOU KNOW!” I think I found a better phrase that is closer to how I feel,

“I love YOU, not your validation.”

You don’t need to provide me anything, you don’t have to “give” me anything, I just want you around. Like I said before, I don’t relate to this concept of allowing other people to be a lens by which to evaluate my worth. I think that happens when you love a person for the validation they provide, not necessarily a love for the person inherently. These are two separate concepts that I think is a significant mistake made in a lot of relations in general, not just romantic.

I love being in the company of the ones I love. Just being close, I don't need a lot. I have low expectations (another bi-product of that pesky upbringing). I don't need 24/7 validation, because I know that I'm the shit lol. I will enjoy the validation and accept it, but it's just not a currency I hold in my bank account. A person choosing to stick around, is all I need to know that you care. (Jesus Christ, the more I write the more I am seeing how fucked up I am lmao)

"A person CHOOSING to stick around is all I need to know that they care" Bro. This is the most broken shit I have ever fucking heard (let alone written). But, I don't know if it's a bad mentality or not. I feel like it could be, if used in the wrong way. Let’s make sure we don’t use it in the “wrong way” then.

Expecting the expectations

So how do we extract the good from a process and leave the shitty behavior behind in this instance?

A problem with having low expectations of others, is that it can lead you to give people less than what they might need in a relationship. Having a low expectation of others is probably fine, but the issue arises when you rationalize that because YOU don’t expect, others shouldn’t expect at the same capacity you do as well. You will likely come off as cold and uncaring, it’s the feeling that family, friends and romantic partners will all have a sense of if you don’t recognize and adjust.

Just because I have a low expectation or a low necessity of validation or affection, means I have two paths. Either I find somebody who is similar in the sense that they have a low necessity for my validation, a person that is extremely independent and sometimes comes off as cold and uncaring. Or I recognize that I have a below average necessity and that means that I should understand that and meet people where they are.

Just because I don’t need a phone call from people I love to know that they care, doesn’t mean that I should abstain from calling. Just because I don’t need validation to feel confident in myself, doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t uplift people and try to give them a boost. Just because I don’t care about holidays and receiving gifts or congratulations, doesn’t mean that I should refrain from these acts.

Putting in effort to show people that I do care is just something that has no negative downsides. (bro cannot help but rationalize everything lmao)

To wrap up this article, I was listening to a podcast. A podcast I had never tuned into before, but they had Dr.K on as a guest. Dr. K is a Harvard Psychiatrist who runs a YouTube channel that is geared towards promoting mental health to “gamers”. I’ve been listening to him for quite some time and likely, watching his videos has drip fed some of his knowledge into my little goblin brain. But as I was coming closer to finishing my thoughts on this article, I tuned into the podcast “Diary of a CEO” purely because Dr. K was on. And there was a moment that struck a chord with me and bewildered me as I heard it. As Dr. K was speaking during a portion of the interview, I wasn’t learning something new. I was hearing the words that I’ve been writing for the last couple of months.

Between the 45:55 - 47:53 timestamp in the podcast, Dr. K begins to explain one of the major problems with relationships in the world today. At the inception of human society there has always been a survival necessity for human contact with one another. But as technology has advanced, society has evolved to no longer be an environment where other people are a necessity for physical survival.

“Fundamentally what has always bound human beings together is like, I need you and you need me. Otherwise, we’re not gonna survive. But what’s happening in the world today is we no longer need each other for survival. So I never even need to leave my house, I can order groceries, I can order food, I can work from home, I can literally stay in my home or in my room and I never need to walk out of the house. I never need to interact with someone… So now what we’re gonna have to do as a society is, evolve. We’re gonna have to start to realize that we don’t need relationships anymore, in order to survive. But without them we will all suffer. And so what we need to do is evolve as humans and I think part of that is like, learning some of these yogic and meditation skills so that we can resist the negative influences of technology. But that also means, prioritizing relationships even when we don’t need to.”

Dr. Alok Kanojia

For context watch from 45:55 - 47:53

I didn’t figure this out for the general population. I figured it out literally just for myself. The concept that I have been living with for quite some time and just now coming to the conclusion that I need to “evolve” and expect the expectations. This understanding that I don’t have this necessity for other people but should still make that effort, that I have been illustrating throughout this article, is exactly what Dr.K is explaining here.

He managed to really help plug what I was figuring out for myself into a context that helped me understand how it applies to the broader society.

Personally it was a very full circle moment, to have been working on this article for the last 2 months, and for all of it to be solidified by a Harvard professional that I have immense respect for was…

validating.

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