Once someone has a role in your life, it's hard not to judge them for how well they fill it; harder to empathize, to remember that they are a person like you and, like you, live at the center of a very impersonal world in which their own relevance depends entirely on how well they function within the social systems they rely on.
I try so hard to remember this, to make people as useless to me as possible so that I can still appreciate this beauty you can only find in useless things, so that I can stay interested long enough to grasp the principles behind this system we call the person or soul. Self-awareness is the template for every relationship we ever know, and my progress in this task of self-definition has yielded a wealth of late-bloomed social skills, but still the odd sleepless night compels me to wonder at where I'm going with this.
Form as few relationships as possible, that I should never find anyone lacking before my expectations of them, that I may resist the temptation to frame people as instruments, that I may study without bias the psychology and philosophy behind our use of the concepts of self and other, that I may grow ever more skilled at...forming relationships...
*sigh* See, this is why I get along with strangers so much better than I do the people I love -_-
