The Change Factor

I often find myself beating the same drums i’m afraid. 

It’s painfully clear to anyone who reads my writing, or follows up my Facebook posts, that I care deeply and passionately about the fight against HIV/AIDs. That I am a typical Leo who is heartbroken, healing and often takes things too personally, and that I have a sense of moral superiority when it comes to he way we approach justice, compassion mercy and love in our society.

These things, I don’t’ think, are necessarily bad traits.  But some people lately have left me feeling like they are.

A particular “friend” for instance, recently told me that I am too emotionally intense. I’ve heard this before, and I don’t doubt it. I feel like the reality is, I tend to be incredibly intense, as a Fire Sign, I don’t really do passive well, and so I go above and beyond whenever I am in pursuit of anything. When one approaches things with that kind of zeal, it is foreseeable that if they are disappointed, we will in fact, be extremely disappointed. 

This si not an issue for me, in fact I just feel like it is a part of who I am.

But this “friend” seems to be bothered by it. He doesn’t’ like to be on the receiving end of my “tirades” and he doesn’t like to feel put on the spot or committed to anything in terms of hanging out, talking or whatever.  He frequently tells me this, yet he knows those things are always going to happen. I’m always going to be hurt when he ducks out of a tough conversation, or when he says he wants to hangout while we are in the same town, or whatever. But if we don’t’ make it happen, even though he suggests it, I’m supposed to not be me, and react with nonchalance. 

This begs the question:

If I am too emotionally intense, and my expectations are too high, and you have told me time and again to lower them, or to be less disappointed yes I don’t’ do that; why do you keep coming back?

What makes us driven to have interactions with people on our own terms, and not on theirs?

I am not saying I am innocent of this, for I truly am not.  But with respect to this person, I accept them for who they are. I dislike qualities about them and I learn to overlook them or ignore them. But I never try to change or expect something different of them.

Why does he? What makes us try so hard to hold on to that relationship, that we will continuously try to alter the way it is formed and the constructs within it, which are permanent, in order to maintain it?

Do you have friends like this? Who are always trying to convince you to be someone else? Or react differently? And how successful are they? Do people really change? Is that why we try this?

I often think, randomly of my favorite line in Great Expectations “people don’t’ change, Pip. People don’t change.”