mirrors

I fall in love with people all the time. Easily, platonically, romantically, quietly, intensely. At my core, I am a lover girl. I find humanity endlessly beautiful, complex, and fascinating. I get a kick out of our contradictions, our quiet motivations, the illusions we cling to, and the ideologies we hide behind. I love discovering the little things that make people who they are. The stories they tell, the dreams they carry, and the peculiar ways they move through the world. I love catching glimpses of who people are beneath everything they've learned to be.

Then I go out into the world and see our egos at play.

I can't help but notice the delicate fracture between who we are at our core, who God made us to be, and the choices we make in an effort to be perceived a certain way. I've watched people show up as their truest selves, only to retreat the moment that genuineness is reciprocated. I've watched egos re-emerge, dissolving raw, real connections that were just beginning to take root.

And it's a strange thing, how desperately we seem to want the very things we resist receiving.

"I want love," we say, and then love arrives, but we shrink back because it doesn't look the way we imagined. "I want to make an impact," we say, and when we get the opportunity, we balk at the labor required. "I want success," we say, but we are more enamored with recognition than discipline, more interested in being perceived as extraordinary than doing the ordinary work that makes something extraordinary possible.

There is something sad about the distance between our desires and our willingness to receive them. How easily we become enamored with the idea of a life while resisting the very experiences that might bring it into being.

Recently, I let someone into my wonky little world. I met him where he was, without any particular expectations of who he needed to be. I liked him for who he was. There was something genuine there, and I responded to it with sincerity. But the closer we got, the colder and meaner he became. And he might have another perspective about why it ended, but this is mine.

Intimacy has a way of bringing our insecurities to the surface. We are mirrors for one another, whether we intend to be or not. The closer we get to another person, the more of ourselves we begin to see reflected back. Our tenderness, our fears, our contradictions, the parts of ourselves we would rather keep hidden. And if you don't like what you see? Well…

Watching something that began with warmth slowly deteriorate into insecurity, defensiveness, and conflict was disappointing, honestly. But I can make peace with two people discovering they aren't aligned. That happens. What saddens me is watching someone become an obstacle to the very things they claim to want, seemingly unaware of their own participation in the outcome.

Watching an open door become another grievance. An opportunity for connection become another conflict. A chance to grow become another occasion to defend an identity that was never under attack to begin with. I don't presume to know God's intentions for anyone's life, but I do believe that blessings often arrive without spectacle. Sometimes they look a lot like responsibility. Sometimes they look like an uncomfortable truth. Sometimes they look like an ordinary person extending an extraordinary amount of grace. And sometimes receiving what we've asked for requires us to give up the hypothetical version of ourselves that has been standing in our way.

I think that's what makes ego so tragic, honestly. It convinces us that protecting our self-image is more important than experiencing genuine connection with another person. That being right is more important than being understood. That maintaining appearances is somehow preferable to the vulnerability required to actually grow.

And the cost isn't always immediately apparent. Sometimes it accumulates slowly, in relationships that dissolve, opportunities that pass, and doors that close while we remain convinced that someone else was holding them shut.

I was there, and now I'm not. I don't say that to suggest I was some great blessing he failed to recognize. And I’m not so arrogant as to imagine myself the missed opportunity of someone's lifetime, nor will I pretend that I am immune to having an ego of my own. But I was a person who arrived in this dude's life with genuine intentions. I offered what was sincere in me. I was kind, considerate, and patient. And it isn't arrogant to understand how valuable that is.

But I digress…

I'm still a lover girl. I still fall in love with people, with their peculiarities and contradictions, their unfinished stories and impossible dreams. I still believe there is something sacred about meeting another human being with an open heart. I'm just learning that seeing the beauty in someone's soul doesn't obligate me to stand beside them while their shitty ego-driven behavior pushes people away.