DailyJim: Would you rather be a stalker or an avoider?

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. Today is Thursday, July 11th, 2024. Today I want to talk about, would you rather be a stalker or an avoider?

Would you rather be a stalker or avoider? So the question came to me as I have been debating, what do I do when I seem to want to have a deeper relationship relationship or a closer connection with someone than they want to have with me. Often what has happened is people have told me, hey, no, I don't want to be that close, especially women. No, no, no, just friends. Don't be so close. I don't want to talk so much. What did somebody say to me? I want a friend, not someone who's going to play therapist all the time. Stuff like this. Basically saying, hey, back off. Like, I don't want to be that close. I've even had friends who have converted to a deeper, more conservative religious tradition saying they're not allowed to even talk to men who are not their husband or family member. Okay, talk, shake hands, things like this. And I asked myself, what do I do? Because if I continue to talk to them the way I want to talk, if I continue to want a closer relationship with them than they want, often we call that a stalker or someone who is stalking someone who is going beyond the limits of what someone else wants. But we often don't talk about the opposite, where what happens when a person...

Makes a relationship more distant than the other person wants? What happens when a person runs away? What happens when a person avoids? Maybe avoider is not even the term. Maybe it's a fleer. Maybe it's a stranger. Maybe it's, you know, somebody who distances.

I think avoid works pretty well. So what do we do in those scenarios when someone is avoiding us? Should we avoid people who don't want to be too close to us? Would we rather be the person that That is farther away than someone he wants or closer than somebody wants.

I'm curious what your reactions would be to this, what your preference has been in your life. Maybe if you've even thought about this before, what to do when somebody says, ah, you're getting too close. Do we continue to behave in the way that we do or do we try to hold back and match them? But the problem is maybe at some point we pull back and they say, oh, but you're still too close. And then we pull back a little bit even more and they go, oh, but you're still too close.

And so that's the one scenario where the person says we're too close. What happens when the person says we're too far away? What happened to you? Why did you disappear? Why have you been avoiding me? Why haven't you talked to me? What's going on in your life? I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to talk about it. So what happens on the opposite side when somebody basically wants us to be closer to them than we want to be? I don't know. It's just something I've been pondering a lot because I think I have a tendency to want a closer, deeper relationship with most people than most people want with me or than most people want with life. And maybe it's not even a relationship with the other people. It's a relationship with life. Life how close do we want to be with life do we want to almost stalk life and be so deeply connected to life even if life is like no no no don't be so close um or do we want to kind of distance from life and avoid it a bit where life is like hey come back like pay attention to me no no no i'm not gonna i'm gonna avoid you i'm gonna ignore you um and maybe that's not even so much about life maybe it's about our relationship to ourselves how much do we avoid ourselves how much do we stalk ourselves.

Interesting question, I think. How much do we run away from ourselves or how much do we get closer to ourselves than we actually want? I remember when I first was working on iFeelio, I had a former colleague write me an email and said, wow, Jim, this app really makes you be honest with yourself, doesn't it? I said, uh-huh, yep. And another friend who was using the app and she said, Jim, before I write into it, I look around. And I said, but only a hundred people in the world are using it right now, even though it exists. She says, but I know it exists and I know what I'm going to put into it. And so kind of this, do we run away from ourselves or do we confront ourselves? And I think I would rather confront myself than run away from myself. And maybe that's really the question, not even about other people or about life, maybe in general, but our relationships to ourselves. And do we want to be the person who avoids ourself or the person who confronts ourself and stalks maybe even? I don't know if stalking ourselves even makes sense. But this idea of are we running away from ourselves or are we running towards ourselves? And I think a lot of people are running away from themselves. And I don't like doing it. But when I don't run away from myself, when I run toward myself, then I tend to run towards other people as well. And they may not like it because now I'm getting closer to them. But really, maybe the actual thing is that as I'm closer to them, I am asking them to be closer with themselves. I'm asking them to stop running away from themselves.

Wow, maybe that feels epiphany level, that a lot of people are running away from themselves. A lot of us are avoiding ourselves. selves. And when someone else is not avoiding themselves, when somebody is really trying to confront and build a deeper relationship with themselves, it's really hard to be around that person if we also don't want to form a deeper relationship with ourselves. And maybe this is why it causes a lot of problems with people in my life in that they're not so angry at me, they're not angry at this, they're angry or frustrated that being around me, because I am more connected to myself, maybe, or I'm at least confronting myself on certain issues more, it seems that it forces them to also pay attention to themselves and confront themselves and they may not want to. And yeah, but should I, how can I interact with people? How can I be really connected myself and interact with other people and not. Be connected to what's going on with them. I don't know. I just don't, I just don't know if it's possible. And so maybe if the idea of being too close to someone is someone who is stalking, who is trying to come too close to me, closer than I want them to be, maybe I just accept, that I would rather be labeled as a stalker than labeled as an avoider. Or Or maybe there's a more harsh word we can use for that. So it balances out the bad connotation that many of us give to the word stalker. I wonder. So I'm going to think on that. Maybe there's a word for avoiding that is equal to the pain and fear of the word stalker.

So anyways, on that note, this is the end of the week. I am still reflecting on that. We'll reflect on it more. more, feeling a little more confident that, you know, if people don't want to confront themselves, I'm not going to stop confronting myself. And if they don't want me around them, they can block me or put up barriers to stop me in some way. So yeah, I don't know. Sounds weird to reflect on this, but I think it's an underlying concept, paradox, dichotomy, dilemma, maybe dilemma. Yeah, there we go. Of what I think many of us are actually facing. So especially nowadays in the age of social media and constant connection, at least telecommunication connection and seeing people show up everywhere on social media. So on that note, I will talk to you all next week. Have however weekend you want to have.